American Democracy (Top Ten Finest Moments by VH1)

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/11717105/robert_f_kennedy_jr__will_the_next_election_be_hacked RFK Jr’s Rolling Stone article on election tampering. In it a former Diebold employee talks about how in two incredibly Democratic counties they applied a patch during the 2002 election, which supposedly fixed a clock problem. Apparently there is some circumstantial evidence that it actually was installed to throw the election to the Republican candidate. Oh well, no way to tell for sure since there is no paper trail with these electronic voting machines.

iRaq

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060921/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_civilian_deaths

Wow, that sucks.

Also:

http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEM7ZF8LURE_index_0.html

Old and Cold: The North Pole
The New Hotness: Global Warming

Additionally:

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=711997

I especially found the comments on Anti-Israeli vs. Anti-Semetic to be rather interesting.

The Age of Empires

http://www.krysstal.com/democracy_whyusa01.html

I haven’t had time to verify these from another source, but it wouldn’t surprise me. I’d be interested to read an analysis of economics correlated with empires. For example, during the Age of Mercantilism England became the dominant impirial force, and I think that there exists a strong argument for calling the US the dominant impirial force during this age of Democratic Capitalism. It’d be interesting to see if you could look at all empires through history and define their reign in terms of the dominant political-economic system.

USA Backed Coups

http://www.krysstal.com/democracy_whyusa01.html

I haven’t had time to verify these from another source, but it wouldn’t surprise me. I’d be interested to read an analysis of economics correlated with empires. For example, during the Age of Mercantilism England became the dominant impirial force, and I think that there exists a strong argument for calling the US the dominant impirial force during this age of Democratic Capitalism. It’d be interesting to see if you could look at all empires through history and define their reign in terms of the dominant political-economic system.

I took a course once called the evolution of war, which tried to explain changes in warfare through out history using 6 elements, one of which was political-economic system. I thought that was the most interesting element.

About to go critical

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/20/us/20park.html?ex=1316404800&en=d2841d33d7ba0c57&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Problems with nuclear power, and why it can really suck.

Of course, there are lots of things that can cause environmental damage. Famous to Bloomington, IN are PCBs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polychlorinated_biphenyl

Here’s more info about the mess:
http://copa.org/studies/intro.htm