Our empire is struggling with delusions of grandeur and dreams of full spectrum dominance via assassin robot machines. We think that throwing away a trillion dollars in futile military games in an endless open war against the Muslim religion is the key to future wealth and power. This is pure insanity. NO empire has EVER flourished if it goes into endless religious or ideological wars in distant lands.
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ΩΩThis is all about ‘hearts and minds’: the very hardest thing to change is someone’s mind. It doesn’t matter what the belief is, it is very powerful, stubborn, and buried very deeply. Individuals can change their minds but this is painful, difficult and must come from inside, not outside. That is, someone has to want to change their mind in the first place. Then it might be possible after great effort.
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ΩΩOf all people on earth, the one group with the longest history of being very stubborn about changing their minds are the Afghani tribes. Generally speaking, various empires tried using whips, guns and bribes to persuade these very, very stubborn people to surrender. At home, where the wannabe rulers can’t see them, the tribal leaders mutter and boast about past victories achieved via being very, very stubborn. They count the days before they drag yet another hubristic empire down to destruction.
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ΩΩBelow is a photo of a stupid flag raising ceremony held by our Roman Legions in a mud corral in Afghanistan. The US flew in via helicopter the corrupt members of different tribes who use the US military as their tools, to deliver a speech to the rival tribes we just rounded up after most of the fighters melted into the general landscape or moved silently into Kabul to attack from there.
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ΩΩI had to enlarge the goofy photo because I was very suspicious about what was really going on. The people in the center seemed to look more like frightened refugees rather than cheering people. Indeed, they were all in these queer lines within certain strips, all lined up carelessly, because they were surrounded by armed guards who aimed their machine guns at them! Sheesh. Why didn’t any reporters from the empire tell us this?
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ΩΩHAHAHA. Ah, the happy Afghani peasants want us to rule them, of course! Three cheers for the New Soviet State! Afghan flag raised over war-torn Taliban stronghold – CNN.com
A few hundred people watched the event, attended by Helmand Gov. Gulab Mangal, other provincial and local officials, and military officials. “I think we’re feeling pretty good about the control of the populated areas, the infrastructure,” said Brig. Gen. Larry Nicholson, commander of U.S. Marines in southern Afghanistan.
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ΩΩIt is obvious to me that these people don’t feel very good about anything. Of course, the Roman Legionnaire can’t speak 5 words of their local dialect. Nor does he care about who they are or their stubborn history. He thinks, if he rounds up the weakest members of the tribe and then shoves his flag down their throats, they will salute him and kiss his bloody boots and maybe even lick them.
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ΩΩOf course, the corrupt natives he carted over for the brief, sullen victory ceremony are crooks and the people hunched on the ground all know this and hate the Quislings we cart about the landscape, killing anyone who hates the Quislings exactly like the Nazis did the same thing for the same reasons. Shoo! Who could believe we could be so dumb?
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ΩΩWe did this in Vietnam. We took hamlets and villages and even cities, rounded up the peasants and bellowed at them and displayed our flags and carted the exact same corrupt thieves to lecture them and then at night the villagers would slit everyone’s throats. End of story.
Op-Ed Contributor – The American Empire Will Rise Again – NYTimes.com
Mr. Biden was referring in particular to the influential book “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” by Paul Kennedy, a British historian who teaches at Yale. Published in 1988, the book argues that the ascendancy of states or empires results from the superiority of their material resources, and that the wealth on which that dominance rests is eroded by the huge military expenditures needed to sustain national or imperial power, leading inexorably to its decline and fall. The thesis seems a tad schematic, but Professor Kennedy maintains it with dazzling cogency. In any debate about the development of the United States, one would certainly tend to side with the detached historian rather than the partisan politician….
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The NYT is, along with the Washington Post, a 100% full time warmongering rag especially when it comes to fighting Muslims all over the planet earth. The support for fighting commies was more nuanced than this stupid religious war we are stuck in. The commies might be bad but we didn’t have to kill everyone, the civilians killed were in the way.
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We didn’t use robot assassins to kill whole families. We ‘accidentally’ killed the Vietnamese by bombing cities but they could run to bomb shelters. After a while, we DID murder and massacre whole villages for the hell of it, thinking that the only good Indian was a dead Vietnamese, so to speak.
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The rise and fall of ALL empires is important to understand because most of them if not all, rise thanks to conquering rich lands. For example, Rome conquered Egypt which provided Rome with free grain used to the infamous ‘bread and circuses’ which degraded the entire population to the point, they were utterly useless.
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Spain conquered the New World and sucked out a lot of the gold and silver there. This paid for endless religious wars with stubborn Germans, Dutch and Czech fighters in Europe. Not to mention the ongoing war against Muslims, too. As well as feeding the very corrupt Catholic Church which needed endless funds, too. Within 100 years, the Spanish empire was an economic basket case and soon, a military basket case, too.
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…Now doom-mongers conjure with Roman and British analogies in order to trace the decay of American hegemony. In so doing they ignore Gibbon’s warning about the danger of comparing epochs remote from one another. It is obviously possible to find striking similarities between the predicament of Rome and that of Washington (itself modeled on classical lines, incidentally, because it aspired to be the capital of a mighty empire). Overstretch is common to both, for example: Rome defended frontiers on the Tigris, the Danube and the Rhine; America’s informal empire, controlled diplomatically, commercially and militarily, girdles the globe….
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Exactly like the British and Spanish empires: the nation that rules the Seven Seas gets all kinds of goodies and powers which are instantly wasted on religious wars, military overspending, grotesque projects like building immense palaces for the royals, etc. The temptation to do this while not taxing the home base is very, very strong and invariably leads to the empire going broke to international bankers.
. …But the differences are palpable. The Roman economy depended on agriculture whereas the United States has an enormous industrial base, producing nearly a quarter of the world’s manufactured goods, and dominates the relatively new invention of the service economy….
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Um, one of our few major money making export products happens to be…AGRICULTURAL! HAHAHA. Not manufactured….EXCEPT for military equipment. Half of more of our ‘manufactured goods’ happens to be military stuff. And many of these sales are fake: we have to provide the money for these sales. A lot of these sales are actually on the taxpayer’s tab. But hidden from view.
. …Despite its grave problems, there are some relatively simple steps America could take to recover its position. It could bring its military commitments into line with its resources, rely more on the “soft power” of diplomacy and economic engagement and, as George Washington said, take advantage of its geographically detached situation to “defy material injury from external annoyance.” Such a policy would permit more investment in productive enterprise and pay for butter as well as guns, thus vindicating Joe Biden’s faith in the recuperative capacities of the Great Republic.
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ΩΩCongress votes often 98% or more for any military spending, any military adventure and any military whatevers. It doesn’t matter, this is the biggest piggy in the pig pen of Washington, DC. Which was exactly like it was in Spain in the 17th century. More interested in lining pockets, the military can’t even rouse itself out of its own slumber when 4 planes were engaged in a multi-hour attack on important domestic targets.
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ΩΩThe military was totally distracted when a major category 5 hurricane was approaching a major port city and did little when the port was nearly destroyed. Certainly, the effort to save the populace was laggard and half-hearted. Meanwhile, these same military leaders are killing US citizens trying to round up annoyed peasants in Afghanistan for a flag raising photo-op.
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BBC News – Afghanistan capital Kabul hit by suicide attack
The attack took place in an area of hotels and guesthouses popular with foreigners. Up to nine Indians, a Frenchman and an Italian were killed. Three gunmen and two policemen died in a gun battle that lasted several hours. The Taliban said they were behind the attack.
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ΩΩEvery time we capture a peasant we don’t like, we announce it as a victory. The stubborn peasants must give it up now that they have no leaders. We will kill any peasants who step into the leadership role and any we capture will be hideously tortured since we threw away the Nüremberg trial rulings and have decided torture is not only OK, it is as nifty a tool as robot assassins!
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ΩΩThese two nifty tools don’t win any hearts and minds. It increases hatred and a desire for revenge which can lurk below the surface for decades. Talking about capturing annoying peasants, the Iranians captured a CIA tool. Not that this made any American news (the cone of silence is still working just fine):
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Asia Times Online :: Middle East News, Iraq, Iran current affairs
It was the morning after the dramatic capture of the 31-year-old leader of the dreaded Pakistan-based terrorist group Jundallah, Abdulmalik Rigi, in a stunning operation by Iranian intelligence….
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In the spy vs spy world of the murky West Asian politics, someone ratted out this guy in exchange for something interesting, lord only knows what the deal was…too many players in this game.
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… In turn, that would have implications for the United States-Iran standoff. But that is only one aspect. The fact is that Tehran has put Washington on the back foot at a critical juncture. Rigi is bound to spill the beans – he may already have begun – and much is going to surface about the covert activities by the US forces based in Afghanistan to subvert Iran by hobnobbing with Jundallah, which, incidentally, is also known to have links with al-Qaeda.
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Al Qaeda is a CIA operation. The bin Ladens were very, very close to both Senior and Jr Bush. This should have been openly investigated heavily with the Bushes and all the CIA operators put under oath in public. Every detail should have been coughed up. Instead, the wretched operations continue onwards.
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Of course, this gives our wretches in Congress an excuse to pass the Patriot Act again. Oh, we might be attacked by religious fanatics angry about us fighting them in the Middle East and Central Asia, etc! Whoo. Using Afghanistan as a terrorist base to attack the Shiites is pure insanity and right up there with the wars waged in central Germany by the Spanish throne in the early 1600’s.
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Rigi apparently had a meeting with his US mentors in an American base just a day before his journey to the UAE. It seems he was traveling with a fake Afghan passport provided by the Americans. A lot of highly embarrassing details are trickling in already that will be eagerly lapped up by the so-called “Arab street” and which will make the entire American position on the situation around Iran look rather weak.
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Mossad and the CIA have this thing about fake passports. Naturally, this guy is being tortured mercilessly until he spills the beans. We torture, the Iranians torture, everyone tortures. We are so very fortunate that the Iranians don’t also use robot assassins to kill our own leaders at home while eating dinner or at weddings.
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The American doublespeak on terrorism comes out all too starkly. The big question is whether Pakistan played a helpful role in Rigi’s capture. Iranian officials flatly insist that Rigi’s capture was “fully carried out” by Iranian agencies, including its “management, operation and planning” and the credit goes “solely to our country’s security and task forces”.
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ΩΩThis story is from the Asia Times and therefore, doesn’t bang the ‘USA is great’ drums. So we get some honest questions and analysis. I wish to thank the AT for publishing online so I can get occasional real news. The blanket of silence in US media is very frustrating. This is why few Americans can give an informed vote in elections, we have collectively, not the faintest idea what is going on in the rest of the world.
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ΩΩIt should be ominously obvious that killing and torturing Afghanis will not make us safer.
Officials puzzle over millions of dollars leaving Afghanistan by plane for Dubai
The cash, estimated to total well over $1 billion a year, flows mostly to the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai, where many wealthy Afghans now park their families and funds, according to U.S. and Afghan officials. So long as departing cash is declared at the airport here, its transfer is legal.
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But at a time when the United States and its allies are spending billions of dollars to prop up the fragile government of President Hamid Karzai, the volume of the outflow has stirred concerns that funds have been diverted from aid. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, for its part, is trying to figure out whether some of the money comes from Afghanistan’s thriving opium trade. And officials in neighboring Pakistan think that at least some of the cash leaving Kabul has been smuggled overland from Pakistan.
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“All this money magically appears from nowhere,” said a U.S. official who monitors Afghanistan’s growing role as a hub for cash transfers to Dubai, which has six flights a day to and from Kabul.
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ΩΩWe could spend billions of dollars propping up our own states which are going bankrupt. But not if this means the top elites in say, NY or California pile onto jets every couple of days with suitcases full of cash. We saw the international bankers bailed out and they pretty much did as the Afghanis are doing. Much of the loot we handed out has vanished overseas to Caribbean accounts or into Asia.
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ΩΩThe US singlehandedly revived the heroin business. It was on the ropes when we invaded. Since we allied ourselves with opium warlords, of course, opium production took off like a rocket. The Taliban were anti-drugs. Now, everyone is producing drugs because it is financially lucrative. Thanks to the US invasion, of course. The Taliban are like the Christian right wing: they hate sex and drugs and rock and roll (heh) but wherever our troops go, we see these three things. They were obviously brought into Vietnam and the moralist communists eradicated much of this evil sex, drugs and rock and roll. Now, it is being revived.
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ΩΩTo the great irritation of the Taliban. Now, who are the bad guys in this story? The moralists or the sex and druggies? As for the last statement of money appearing magically: HAHAHA. The Fed is the magic money machine. The Afghanis actually EARNED this money from the Fed. If the military wants to know where it comes from, they should look in the mirror: it is debt IOUs created to fund them!
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Why Europe Should Run NATO Without the United States – By Andrew J. Bacevich | Foreign Policy
In concrete terms, this attempt to reignite Europe’s martial spirit has found expression in the attempted conversion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) from a defensive alliance into an instrument of power projection. Washington’s aim is this: take a Cold War-inspired organization designed to keep the Germans down, the Russians out, and the Americans in, and transform it into a post-Cold War arrangement in which Europe will help underwrite American globalism without, of course, being permitted any notable say regarding U.S. policy.
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The sole reason Europe went reluctantly along with the US/Israel Muslim crusades was so they could keep up their trade deficits with the US. They have no say in US foreign policies because NO ONE has ANY say at all except wild neocon Zionists.
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The allies have not proven accommodating. True, NATO has gotten bigger — there were 16 member states 20 years ago, 28 today — but growth has come at the expense of cohesion. Once an organization that possessed considerable capability, NATO today resembles a club that just about anyone can join, including, most recently, such military powerhouses as Albania and Croatia.
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Worse, this growth came after the US lied to Russia and swore we would not expand NATO to Russia’s front doorstep. This is a very big part of Russia’s anger at both the US and Eastern Europe. Most US imperialist writers try to ignore this obvious provocation when discussing this matter.
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A club with lax entrance requirements is unlikely to inspire respect even from its own members. NATO’s agreed-upon target for defense spending, for example, is a paltry 2 percent of GDP. Last year, aside from the United States, exactly four member states met that goal….
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Here it is in a nutshell: the US misspends over 6% of our GDP on the military. All the Middle Eastern countries spend over 9% of their GDP on military. But 40% of global military spending is the US. List of countries by military expenditures – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia has some stats that are out of date by 5 years. Now, why does Europe have to spend less than a third of what we spend? This is like any unequal alliance: worthless to us but valuable to the parties who get the financial free ride.
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…Like Nixon setting out for Beijing, like Sadat flying to Jerusalem, like Reagan deciding that Gorbachev was cut from a different cloth, the United States should dare to do the unthinkable: allow NATO to devolve into a European organization, directed by Europeans to serve European needs, upholding the safety and well-being of a Europe that is whole and free — and more than able to manage its own affairs.
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ΩΩEurope just loves poking the Russian bear in the eye and then letting the US bear the brunt and costs of this. Eastern Europe loves this even more. We should unilaterally simply stop our alliance. Tell everyone they are on their own at last. This will be a triumph for Russia but then, so what? This isn’t benefitting us in any way, shape or form anymore than assassinating Afghani peasants is bringing us the slightest improvement in our domestic tranquility.
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In a move that could force President Obama to break his vow to get all combat troops out of Iraq by August of this year, his top commander in Iraq recently officially requested keeping a combat brigade in the northern part of the country beyond that deadline, three people close to the situation said Wednesday….
. ….This debate is just beginning. I expect that Obama actually is going to have to break his promises on Iraq and keep a fairly large force in Iraq, but of course that won’t be the first time he’s had to depart from his campaign rhetoric on this war.
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Speaking of which, CNAS, the little think tank that could, plans today to post a report (Update: now posted) by me titled The Burden about the way forward in Iraq. It argues that we need to think about keeping troops there for many years, not because I think it is a good answer, but because I think it is the least bad one.
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ΩΩSo far, Obama hasn’t met a promise to the liberals that he and his Democratic buddies won’t kneecap with a baseball bat. They aren’t even limping anymore, he is now bludgeoning his promises to a bloody pulp as it lies on the ground, crying in pain. In just one year, he has broken more promises than Tiger Woods has broken marriage vows of fidelity.
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ΩΩOf course, the military wants to keep expanding and keep on spending. The more the merrier. This is exactly what our Founding Fathers feared which is why they had many RESTRICTIONS on the use of military executive power! The Constitution was all about restrictions just like sane banking isn’t about enabling things but RESTRICTING things. There is no Peter Pan Neverneverland which allows unimpeded growth of anything. Our military grew until it was as bloated as the housing bubble. It will now pop when the US goes bankrupt.
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ΩΩIt isn’t protecting us, it is destroying us. Ergo: we must stop this madness. Any general suggesting we park our asses all over the planet should be cashiered and sent to an insane asylum. Spending too much on the military while dire trade rivals spend 60% less on security thanks to our overspending is going to bankrupt America and should cease forthwith. We are running out of time. We can’t withdraw 20 years from now.
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ΩΩAnd we will be no longer running any military bases in the world by then because the Chinese 50 Year Plan is all about forcing us out of all our many military bases and the mothballing of our navy thanks to being bankrupt! End of story.
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ΩΩNow onto the other broken promise, the one the Democrats made about the odious Patriot Act. Here is part of the list of who voted nay. Mostly liberal Democrats. Much of the Black Caucus including all my friends in the Black Caucus who I helped when running for office many years ago, voted to end the Patriot Act and I am very, very pleased about this.
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GovTrack: House Vote #67 (Feb 25, 2010)
ΩΩOnly one third of California’s representatives voted to end this unconstitutional mess. Almost all the GOP right wing voted for this, of course. One outstanding GOP exception, as usual, was Ron Paul of Texas. Congratulations for being on the good side of the scales there, Dr. I feel it is necessary to praise people on the libertarian side for having some principles. We must not forget this, ever. The left/right model isn’t a good fit for what is really going on.
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ΩΩOnly 2 other Texans joined Ron Paul. The rest were craven destroyers of our civil liberties and civil rights. The lone Nevada Republican who is a libertarian, joined Ron Paul in voting nay but the two Democrats voted for the unspeakable act. In Michigan, only one Republican and Democrat voted against it. In all, a very disturbing list of votes. I suggest everyone take a good gander at how both parties are betraying us.
Culture of Life News 
You are underestimating the spending estimate as % of GDP…. not 6% misspent. Thats what the official number is, you are right.
But who believes that number? I don’t.
100% waste of 25% of the real economy, is 25%. When you add up all the on budget/off budget etc items and take into account that a lot of the US GDP is really financial recycling and not productive. We should look at it as a % of manufacturing and real output, like farming, construction, etc. Not hamburger flipping. Or least of all “importing” and marking up as “homegrown gdp”. When Walmart buys a 1$ item and sells it for 10$, 9$ of gdp is credited to the USA. Is this real?
If you look on the site: http://www.truthandpolitics.org/military-relative-size.php there are historical figures.
WWII peak was almost 40%, then it declined but was it just submerged?
This is off the subject, but Elaine I believe I found you on Facebook…..so I sent you a friend request. 🙂
I feel like a hurricane has hit….and now we’re in the eye of the storm and everyone is cheering “it’s over!” and “everything is going back to ‘normal!'”…..but we have the second half of the hurricane to endure and it’s going to be fierce.
This makes no sense to me. Why is this titled:
H.R. 3961:
Medicare Physician Payment Reform Act of 2009
if it is about reauthorizing the Patriot Act?
Has this been wrapped up in Healthcare reform legislation?
emsnews,
About those machine gun guards. . . the same thing happens to U.S. Servicemembers when U.S. [g]enerals visit them in the field. Usually there’s one or two tall, strong, lanky [C]ivilian guards, with languidly slung sub-machine guns, specifically calibered to shoot through military kevlar vests. Be assured the impact is not lost on the twenty-something Corporals, who refer to reports of Osama as “Elvis Sightings” and trade hard drives amongst themselves entitled “Weapons of Mass Erection.”
Elaine will identify with this. 12 million pamphlets will be distributed in Russia in 3 days in response to government oppression of Jehovah’s Witnesses including confiscation of property: Jehovah’s Witnesses address their fellow citizens No violence, simply grassroots information campaign.
What?
In just one year, he has broken more promises than Tiger Woods has broken marriage vows of fidelity.
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Afghanistan is a super secret war… its populism or education that we need on our side… and we arent to populist with karzi near as i can tell
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lots of hungry people dont know much either
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but at least we have super secrets and a formulated chain of command… that stuff is bullet proof
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the southern afghan operation is making a head of steam… lets see if we can find a strong STRONG ally in these ghettos that has a real viewpoint that we can negotiate our position too
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charm offensive
Live news stream out of Chile :
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/tv-de-chile
Yes, I have been watching the earthquake damage on Chilean TV before posting a story about that tragedy.
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