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START_THE_CLOCK

                                                 November 21, 2006

   Where do you start the clock?

   Few, if any countries don't
   have some historical skeletons          ((just quote Alan Moore?))
   in the closet -- not to mention
   embedded in the foundations.

   Certainly not the
   United States.

   And yet, few people                       Not to mention:
   think it's a sane,                          slavery,
   reasonable notion to                        Spanish American War 
   attempt to "Give the                        The Phillipenes      
   country back to the                         Vietnamese War       
   Indians".                                   WWII internment of   
                                               Japanese-Americans...
                    You know, the Indians                           
                    that aren't from India.                         
                                                                    
   The problem is the                Give Columbus a                
   sheer amount of time              break.  Okay, so he              
   that's gone by...                 made a few little              
                                     mistakes...        
   We'd be "giving the                                    
   country back" to people                     Hasn't the statute of
   who *might* be the                          limitations expired
   descendants of the                          on those yet?
   people it was grabbed
   from.

           And the people doing the
           "giving back" would also
           have at best a weak
           connection to the people            "grab" is a useful
           who grabbed it.                      word: it doesn't
                                                stipulate that it
                                                was owned by anyone
  In the case of the                            the way "stole"
  Israel-Palestine affair,                      would.
  I notice that people tend
  to call for Israel to return
  to it's pre-1967 borders
  rather than trying to roll        I would guess that
  back the clock to 1948.           the idea is that a UN
                                    sanction is better
                                    than none.

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