TESTEMONAIL: Right and Discordianism allows room for personal interpretation. You have your theories and I have mine. Unlike Christianity, Discordia allows room for ideas and opinions, and mine is well-informed and based on ancient philosophy and theology, so, my neo-Discordian friends, open your minds to my interpretation and I will open my mind to yours. That's fair enough, right? Just claiming to be discordian should mean that your mind is open and willing to learn and share ideas. You guys are fucking bashing me and your laughing at my theologies and my friends know what's up and are laughing at you and honestly this is my last shot at putting a label on my belief structure and your making me lose all hope of ever finding a ideological group I can relate to because you don't even know what the fuck I'm talking about and everything I have said is based on the founding principals of real Discordianism. Expand your mind.
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Visitors to Myanmar these days often encounter young men in T-shirts emblazoned with a red swastika in a circle and the word "Nazi" written above. World War II-style motorcycle helmets decorated with the fascist emblem are also en vogue on the streets of Yangon.
Myanmar's most popular rock band, which has thousands of fans on Facebook and has toured the United States, is named "The Iron Cross," in reference to a German military medal that was bestowed by Adolf Hitler. The band's logo is a Nazi eagle holding an iron cross instead of a swastika in its claws.
In India, Hitler's autobiographical book Mein Kampf, which among other things proclaims the supremacy of the German race, is regularly sold at bookshops next to the biography of Apple founder Steve Jobs and the country's graduate students are snapping it off the shelves, Cooper says.
In Thailand, which was an ally of Germany and Japan during World War II, school children in the northern city of Chiang Mai dressed up as Hitler and in Nazi SS guard uniforms for a school parade in 2011. A local band named "Slur" produced a song and video called "Hitler," in which dancers put on Hitler mustaches and incorporated the Nazi salute into their dance routine.
In Korea, Nazi symbols have even been used to promote cosmetics, Cooper said. "I wish I could tell you it's the first time we've seen this phenomenon pop up in Asia, but it seems to come up too often," Cooper says. "It's difficult to put a finger on why it's happening."
While many Myanmar youth might not be familiar with the history of Nazism during WWII, many do have a perspective on the Nazis. In certain circles Hitler is seen by some Asians as a strong leader who fought against colonial powers, including England and France, that ruled and oppressed their nations before achieving independence.
American historian Rosalie Metro, who wrote her doctorate thesis on how history is taught in Myanmar, says that popular opinion of Hitler in Myanmar is generally positive. "I asked a few taxi drivers about history, and they said, 'Yes, Hitler is a good, strong leader,'" Metro said. "People say that sometimes."
Myanmar's government-issued history textbooks contribute to this strong leader perception because they do not describe Nazi atrocities, according to Metro.
"They talk about the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, and that the situation was very bad in Germany, that Hitler was a strong leader, and that many Germans felt that the Jews, who controlled the economy, were responsible for their troubles," Metro, who can read Burmese, said in summarizing Myanmar history textbooks. "That's strange because it doesn't say, 'And they were wrong.' And it doesn't mention the Holocaust."
That portrayal is in stark contrast to how schoolbooks refer to the British and the Japanese, who are described broadly as enemies of the Myanmar people who "sucked the lifeblood out of Burma," she said, referring to the country's former name.
We are all subject to the culturally-imposed rose-colored goggles of Geordi LaForge when observing what we have come to call the "modern" UFO enigma. Adhering steadfastly and obediently to the Morals and Dogmas of the Holy Church of Science and Technology, as loyal disciples we blindly abide by the Doctrines and Covenants of the Holy Priests thereof. And we caustically toss such deprecating glares at our ignorant and superstitious ancestors for their absurd explanations of this Clearly Scientific and Unmistakably Space-Age Phenomenon.
We laugh at our foolish predecessors who were not savvy enough to recognize as Space Aliens from Mars the elfs, gnomes, trolls, leprechauns, faeries, sylphs, salamanders, elementals, goblins, genies, incubus, succubus, vampires and daemons which haunted them in their day.
Now we are smart enough to realise that the Clever Martian Space Alien Doctors have mysteriously misplaced all their Scientific Petrie Dishes so they are forced to scoop sample after sample after sample of our skin to replenish their ever-dwindling supply of human DNA and take sample after sample after sample of our cum, ostensibly to grow their own bastardized half-breed spawn. We are only just now smart enough to realise they were not merely vampiric Adepts of the Black Lodge (the Vama Marg) -- milking our tantric energies/life-force/vril/orgone/chi to maintain their own pitiful and pathetic existences.
"As aphids are to ants, so are we to them."
-George Andrews, _Extraterrestrials Among Us_
For, you see, yesterday's vampires have become today's Rectum Coring Reticulan Space Aliens who, apparently famished after their lengthy interstellar Cosmic Voyage ( Doc Courtney Brown's fine work notwithstanding), have managed to stave off their ravenous hunger by gnawing on bovine assholes, carved out with all the precision their Space Age Martian Laser Beam Butthole Slicers can offer.
It's all very scientific, you see.
Yesterday, Faustian mages conjured interstitial entities to have them fetch wealth, power, intell or enlightenment. Today, CSETI's Doc Stevie Greer (when he's not double-crossing and pissing off every fellow UFOlogist under the sun, or alienating his one-time rich sugardaddy, Laurence Rockefeller) "vectors in the friendly Space Brothers" with powerful flashlights, group meditations/visualisations and other Highly Scientific Procedures such as "Koch-Kyborg" pyramidal visualisations or "Coherent Thought Sequencing."
Yesterday, Queen Elizabeth I inquired of her Enochian mage -- Dr. John Dee -- entreating him to consult with the Enochian Angels in order to obtain tactical military advice and the like. Today those wacky DIA boys employ ... uh ... "Scientific" Remote Viewing Protocols to obtain similar intell. (Please note that our illegally extorted tax dollars also finance a wealth of other Scientific Intelligence Gathering Operations -- crystal ball gazing, skrying, tarot card reading, seances, channelings, etc.)
So you can clearly see that we have come a long way.
And now, the mythological serpent which seduced Eve in the garden of Eden has been replaced with the more time- and culture- appropriate Space Alien Lizards from Alpha Draconis. The word Draconis, BTW, being loosely translated, means "dragon" and has surfaced in such places as the name of the legendary vampire Count Dracu (Dracula) and angry diatribes on the Senate floor, accusing certain seat-sitters therein of passing allegedly draconian legislation.) These clever Draco Reptoids who, we are told by Cosmic Awareness(tm), have recently hidden themselves in that hollowed-out battle planetoid, The Hale-Bopp Special, have for millenia buggered our boys and boinked our women and more recently have met with charismatic Masonic entrepreneurs in Salt Lake City to start new religious cults and design tantric occult underwear.
But wait -- it gets even better!
Yes, today the Space Alien Abductees are routinely bent over in order to facilitate the Space Aliens' shoving odd probes up their asses to "enlighten their consciousness," all the while excusing such bizarre and irrationally perverse behaviour by doling out absurdly irrelevant quasi-spiritual new-agey platitudes on the importance of living "green."
So are clever interstitial entities (read: incubus/succubus) raping our people and mind-fucking them into an absurd "cosmic codependence?" Oddly enough, it appears this damn well might be the case (as in the Schaffer quote above, neo-Nephilim 'n all.)
But the RILLY smart ones among us know that the entire Space Alien mind-fuck meme which has so infected the Jungian collective of our day is nothing more than a cover for Uncle Samuel to hide behind as he controls both our noggins and our very souls with his apparently omnipotent EMF/ELF/GWEN/RHIC/EDOM Delgado gizmos, playing his Diabolical HAARP and thereby forcing us as mere pawns to dance to the maniacal drumbeat of his Insidious Electronic Voodoo.
C'mon, folks, is this not much more a case of "my mythology can beat the shit out of your mythology" more than anything else? Are we truly so terrified of having our own sacred cows tipped that we will stoop to such ridiculous lows to rationalise away those events which defy definition from within the constraints of our myopic and hopelessly culture-bound perspectives?
Sit, PSY-OP, sit. Good dog, PSY-OP!
So does the unconscionable, shit-for-brains military/intelligence community piggyback on the coattails of such bizzare interstitial phenomenologies, employing them to cover many of their hideous and inhumane black ops? Of course they do. One needn't look much further than the infamous Pentacle Memo for verification of this insidious PSY-OP.
But did they spawn the initial phenomena in the first place -- the highly elusive "ghosts in the machine" a la Eph. 6:12? Puh-leeeze, in all of their bureaucratic pomp and splendour, they appear to be capable of little more than tripping over their own clueless ineptitude.
Is the modern "UFO/space alien" mythos, then, about milint mindcontrol ops? Yes and no. Is it about folklore, mythology, cultural memes and magick? Yes and no. Is it about currently inexplicable interstitial and/or paranormal phenomena? Yes and no. Is it about political and socio-religious metaprogramming? Yes and no. In fact, it appears to be about damn near everything but "martians flying around in space ships."
In closing, please allow me to quote an ancient Odinnic prophecy which states that "when the world is pregnant with lies, a secret long hidden will be revealed."
And believe me, the gummint -- in it's infinite wisdom -- will be the very last to know.
Or to understand.
Around the time of the Soviet collapse, the economist Peter Murrell published an article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives reviewing empirical studies of efficiency in the socialist planned economies. These studies consistently failed to support the neoclassical analysis: virtually all of them found that by standard neoclassical measures of efficiency, the planned economies performed as well or better than market economies.
Murrell pleaded with readers to suspend their prejudices:QuoteThe consistency and tenor of the results will surprise many readers. I was, and am, surprised at the nature of these results. And given their inconsistency with received doctrines, there is a tendency to dismiss them on methodological grounds. However, such dismissal becomes increasingly hard when faced with a cumulation of consistent results from a variety of sources.
First he reviewed eighteen studies of technical efficiency: the degree to which a firm produces at its own maximum technological level. Matching studies of centrally planned firms with studies that examined capitalist firms using the same methodologies, he compared the results. One paper, for example, found a 90% level of technical efficiency in capitalist firms; another using the same method found a 93% level in Soviet firms. The results continued in the same way: 84% versus 86%, 87% versus 95%, and so on.
Then Murrell examined studies of allocative efficiency: the degree to which inputs are allocated among firms in a way that maximizes total output. One paper found that a fully optimal reallocation of inputs would increase total Soviet output by only 3%-4%. Another found that raising Soviet efficiency to U.S. standards would increase its GNP by all of 2%. A third produced a range of estimates as low as 1.5%. The highest number found in any of the Soviet studies was 10%. As Murrell notes, these were hardly amounts “likely to encourage the overthrow of a whole socio-economic system.” (Murell wasn’t the only economist to notice this anomaly: an article titled “Why Is the Soviet Economy Allocatively Efficient?” appeared in Soviet Studies around the same time.)
Two German microeconomists tested the “widely accepted” hypothesis that “prices in a planned economy are arbitrarily set exchange ratios without any relation to relative scarcities or economic valuations [whereas] capitalist market prices are close to equilibrium levels.” They employed a technique that analyzes the distribution of an economy’s inputs among industries to measure how far the pattern diverges from that which would be expected to prevail under perfectly optimal neoclassical prices. Examining East German and West German data from 1987, they arrived at an “astonishing result”: the divergence was 16.1% in the West and 16.5% in the East, a trivial difference. The gap in the West’s favor, they wrote, was greatest in the manufacturing sectors, where something like competitive conditions may have existed. But in the bulk of the West German economy – which was then being hailed globally as Modell Deutschland – monopolies, taxes, subsidies, and so on actually left its price structure further from the “efficient” optimum than in the moribund Communist system behind the Berlin Wall.
Two men dressed as Oompa Loompas from the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory are being sought by police in connection with an assault in Norwich.
A 28-year-old man was attacked by three men and a woman as he left a kebab house on Prince of Wales Road in the city on Thursday.
Two of the men had painted orange faces and dyed green hair and were wearing hooped tops, as in the 1971 film.
The victim suffered cuts and black eyes, Norfolk Police said.
Police are appealing for witnesses.
The fact that we must specify our identities in advance before making our argument is an index of how powerful, widespread, and largely unquestioned is the premise that arguments always reduce to identity positions. While 21st century anti-oppression politics in the US is an evolving, ad hoc patchwork of theories and practices, we argue for the necessity of identity-based organizing while criticizing how dominant forms of anti-oppression activism have been incapacitated by an unquestioned rhetoric of checking individual “privilege,” by a therapeutic idealization of “culture” and communal origins, and finally by the assumption that identity categories describe homogeneous “communities” of shared political beliefs. We argue that left unquestioned these practices minimize and misrepresent the severity and structural character of identity-based oppression in the US.
According to the dominant discourse of “white privilege” for example, white supremacy is primarily a psychological attitude which individuals can simply choose to renounce instead of an entrenched material infrastructure which reproduces race at key sites across society – from racially segmented labor markets to the militarization of the border. Whiteness simply becomes one more “culture,” and white supremacy a psychological attitude, instead of a structural position of dominance reinforced through institutions, civilian and police violence, access to resources, and the economy. At the same time a critique of “white privilege” has become a kind of blanket, reflexive condemnation of any variety of confrontational, disruptive protest while bringing the focus back to reforming the behavior and beliefs of individuals. We contend that privilege politics is ultimately rooted in an idealist theory of power which maintains that the psychological attitudes of individuals are the root cause of oppression and exploitation, and that vague programs of consciousness-raising will somehow transform oppressive structures.
This politics assumes that demographic categories are coherent, homogeneous “communities” or “cultures.” In Oakland, police, politicians, downtown business interests, and even many “progressive” activists have promoted versions of “community” with radically conservative political content. Communal identity is not automatically a site of political resistance. The violent domination and subordination we face on the basis of our race, gender, and sexuality do not immediately create a shared political vision even though it may create a shared sense of oppression. Identity categories do not indicate political unity or agreement. But the uneven impact of identity-based oppression across society creates the conditions for the diffuse emergence of autonomous groups organizing on the basis of common experiences and a common political understanding of those experiences. There is a difference between a politics which places an idealized and homogenizing cultural heritage at the center of its analysis of oppression, and autonomous organizing against forms of oppression which impact members of marginalized groups unevenly.
Anti-oppression, civil rights, and decolonization struggles clearly reveal that if resistance is even slightly effective, the people who struggle are in danger. The choice is not between danger and safety, but between the uncertain dangers of revolt and the certainty of continued violence, deprivation, and death.
Note, first, that the discussion was not just about racism, but rather gun control, and in fact my entire argument was that allowing gun control to be defined as an issue that pits black interests against white interests was a political and theoretical mistake. More importantly: I say that this position is fraught because it indicates the essentialism that I'm reacting against and the avoidance I'm cautioning against. The essentialism rises from the absurdity of speaking about nonwhite people as some sort of unified bloc.
I brought up the fact that, if I'm going to abandon any particular perspective on race myself and merely adopt the positions of nonwhite people, I might choice nonwhite people whose views are deplorable. I brought up Allen West in our conversation. My point about Allen West is simple: when people say "you should give up your racial arguments and simply listen to what nonwhite people say," they are suggesting that all nonwhite people have the same views. Allen West is black, and he is an Islamophobe. So when he says vile things about nonwhite Muslims, am I obliged to keep quiet, because of his greater understanding of race and racism?
Q dug deeper: "I explicitly specified the kind of people that would be valuable to link and implicitly excluded people who've internalized white supremacy to anti-black, racist ends."
Which is to say (explicitly) that no nonwhite person could arrive at opinions on race that Q finds objectionable unless that person had internalized white supremacy. This is the height of liberal essentialism, the need to look on nonwhite people not as people, with individual agency and fully developed consciousness, but as symbols of purity, which dehumanizes and infantilizes them. I will admit to not always knowing exactly what is right or wrong when we talk about race. But I am damn sure that saying that nonwhite people can only disagree with me because they've internalized white supremacy is a terribly ugly idea.
I don't think this person is a bad person. Hell, I'm certain that s/he has a far better take on race and privilege than 99% of people out there. But this call for enlightened silence is a corrosive seduction. The truth is that all of us are involved with race, and white efforts to remove themselves from the racial dialogue-- to say "forgive me, and I'll hold my tongue"-- are really efforts to be rescued from the discomfort of race talk, to be rescued from the possibility of being accused of racism. I understand that appeal, but I think it's ruinous, and based on a host of bad assumptions. Trust me: it would be far safer for me to adopt the company line of defensive avoidance and noncommittal silence that is the common tongue of social liberalism. I risk incurring the wrath of commenters like Q because I think that trying to hide out is a kind of capitulation.
As reported by Marjie Lundstrom and Sam Stanton of the Sacramento Bee, a 92-page report issued by investigators from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services found that hospital administrators failed to properly enforce federal regulations regarding the experimental surgeries performed by neurosurgeons Dr. J. Paul Muizelaar, chairman of the department of neurological surgery, and Dr. Rudolph J. Schrot, an assistant professor and neurosurgeon with 13 years experience working under Muizelaar.
The experimental surgeries in question involved opening the skull of and deliberately infecting the brains of cancer patients with the bacterium Enterobacter aerogenes, without FDA or Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval, and without compelling scientific evidence in support of the immunological hypothesis that a brain infection in glioblastoma patients could improve outcomes.
The federal watchdog agency went so far as to say the neurosurgeons, Dr. J. Paul Muizelaar and Dr. Rudolph J. Schrot, may have been responsible for "contributing to or causing the death of at least one patient."
UC Davis officials rejected some of the investigators' harshest findings, responding in their "plan of correction" that the agency's findings were incorrect in some areas and that the medical center already had taken steps to correct problems.
"We're confident we're providing excellent patient care," said Ann Madden Rice, the medical center's chief executive officer.
In an age long ago, the last village of clever, peace-loving Hobbits is attacked and enslaved by the Java Men, komodo-worshiping, dragon-riding cannibals. Now the young Hobbit Goben, along with his father and sister, must seek help from the "giants" (human hunters) to find the Javas' lair and rescue the last surviving Hobbits, Goben's mother among them. In their quest to destroy the Javas, the heroic partnership of humans and Hobbits will transform both species forever.
Two elephants have been saved from the deadly Siberian cold by drinking vodka, Russian officials say.
They say the animals had to be taken out into the bitter cold after the wooden trailer they were travelling in caught fire in the Novosibirsk region.
The elephants, aged 45 and 48, suffered frostbite to the tips of their ears amid temperatures of -40C (-40F)
But they were warmed up by two cases of vodka mixed with warm water, one official was quoted as saying.
"They started roaring like if they were in the jungle! Perhaps, they were happy," the official told Russia's Ria Novosti news agency.
The so-called "poo pond" at Kandahar airfield is one of the few parts of the US and Nato mission in Afghanistan that everyone agreed should go as soon as possible.
A lake of sewage sitting on the indisputably grim-looking intersection of All-American Boulevard and Louisiana Road, it holds the waste produced by 30,000 people using hundreds of portable toilets.
There are few places on the sprawling military camp where the desert wind doesn't carry an occasional whiff of its contents, and locals and soldiers alike were looking forward to the day the smell would finally be removed.
But plans to drain it this autumn have fallen apart.
Here is a description of Vance Muse, creator of the "right to work" movement, from a book by an old celebrated journalist, Stetson Kennedy, the reporter who famously went undercover inside the KKK and wrote a tell-all in the 40’s:Quote"The man Muse is quite a character. He is six foot four, wears a ten-gallon hat, but generally reserves his cowboy boots for trips Nawth. Now over fifty [this is published in 1946—M.A.], Muse has been professionally engaged in reactionary enterprises for more than a quarter of a century."
Among Vance Muse’s "reactionary enterprises": He lobbied against women’s suffrage, against the child-labor amendment, against the 8-hour workday, and in 1936, Muse engineered the first split in the South’s Democratic Party by peeling off the segregationists and racists from the New Deal party, a political maneuver that eventually led to Strom Thurmond, George Wallace, and at last a Republican right-wing takeover of the South, and with it, the collapse of the old New Deal coalition. Which worked out fine for Vance Muse, since he was a covert Republican himself, serving "for years" as the Republican Party state treasurer in Texas.
That first attempt at splitting the Democratic party by peeling away the Southern segregationist-fascists took place in 1936, when Georgia’s brutal white supremacist governor, Eugene Talmadge, organized a "grassroots" convention with Vance Muse’s help. To stir up anti-FDR and anti-New Deal hate in the South, Vance Muse used photographs he acquired showing First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt being escorted by two African-American professors at Howard University. Muse used that photo to stir up the white supremacists in Georgia, he leaked it to as many newspapers as he could, and he even brandished it around a Senate hearing he was called before in 1936. Those hearings revealed that the anti-FDR "convention" that Vance Muse put on, through his "Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution"— which featured guests of honor like Gerald L K Smith, America’s leading anti-Semite and godfather to the modern American Nazi movement — was financed not only by Confederate sponsors like Texan Will Clayton, owner of the world’s largest cotton broker, but also reactionary northeast Republican money: the DuPont brothers, J. Howard Pew of Sun Oil, Alfred Sloan of General Motors... That unholy alliance of Northeastern and Confederate plutocrat money financed the first serious attempt at splitting the Southern Democrats off by exploiting white supremacism, all in order to break labor power and return to the world before the New Deal — and to the open shop.
Incidentally, Vance Muse’s northern donors — DuPont, Pew, Sloan — were the same core investors in (and board directors of) the first modern libertarian think-tanks of the 40s and 50s, including the Foundation for Economic Education. DuPont, Pew and Sloan funds also seeded the American careers of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman and Murray Rothbard, among others. In other words, Vance Muse’s funders built the first layer of the libertarian nomenklatura that Charles Koch later took control of — no surprise, since Koch outfits are credited with making the Michigan "right to work" law possible.
...Getting back to Vance Muse: In 1936, he incorporated in Texas another union-busting outfit called the "Christian American Association" which was closely associated with the Texas Ku Klux Klan as well as the American Legion, a far-right veterans’ group used to bust up unions and terrorize minorities and suspected Communists. It was this same Christian American Association which launched the "right to work" anti-union campaign using that very same euphemism.
The transition to our time has been seamless. Charles Koch’s father, Fred Koch, made his name in right-wing politics as one of the leaders of the Kansas Right-to-Work movement. The fight in Kansas was more bitter and protracted than in Texas — Kansas had a strong tradition of populism and farmer socialism — but in 1958, they succeeded and the law passed. That same year, Fred Koch co-founded the crypto-fascist John Birch Society with eleven other industrialists, the most powerful grassroots libertarian outfit of the postwar era until his son Charles raised libertarianism to an entirely new level.
Among other things, the John Birch Society taught that President Eisenhower was a conscious active Communist agent taking orders from Moscow; that the Civil Rights movement was a Communist conspiracy and Martin Luther King took direct orders from Moscow; and that the world was controlled by a group of conspiratorial insiders known as the Illuminati; and that America is "a republic, not a democracy."
Politically, its goal was the same as Vance Muse’s: reversing "the whole new-deal march toward state socialism" and expunging "the disease of collectivism," in the words of Bircher leader Robert Welch. In other words: union-busting, stripping government benefits and eliminating taxes on the rich. (To understand why Fred Koch and the Bircher libertarians hated Ike so much, imagine today a Republican like Eisenhower who raised the top marginal tax rate to 91%, who poured massive government investments into building roads and schools, who publicly declared his support for Social Security and denounced any Republican who opposed it — you get the point.)
The founder of the National Right To Work Committee in the mid-1950s, Reed Larson, came from Fred and Charles Koch’s base in Wichita, Kansas — headquarters of Koch Industries. Fred Koch teamed up with Reed Larson to pass Kansas’ Right-to-Work law, and Reed Larson’s "National Right to Work Committee" intertwined itself with Fred Koch’s John Birch Society.
Asia will wield more global power than the US and Europe combined by 2030, a forecast from the US intelligence community has found.
Within two decades China will overtake the US as the world's largest economy, the report adds.
It also warns of slower growth and falling living standards in advanced nations with ageing populations.
Global Trends 2030, issued to coincide with Mr Obama's second term, says it aims to promote strategic thinking.
Published every four years, the report from the National Intelligence Council (NIC) aims to draw together a wide sweep of "megatrends" driving transformation in the world.
'Slow relative decline'
The NIC suggests that by 2030, Asia will have more "overall power" than the US and Europe combined - taking into account population size, gross domestic product (GDP), military spending and investment in technology.
"China alone will probably have the largest economy, surpassing that of the United States a few years before 2030," the report says.
"Meanwhile, the economies of Europe, Japan, and Russia are likely to continue their slow relative declines."
But the report says it does not anticipate that China will emerge as a superpower in the mould of the US, forging coalitions to take on international issues.
Speaking at a news briefing, Mathew Burrows, counsellor to the National Intelligence Council said: "Being the largest economic power is important... [but] it isn't necessarily the largest economic power that always is going to be the superpower."
