our emotional boundaries

Like us, Nature has not made any progress (in human terms), it has as not had any cosmetic surgery; and rock, mud and tree have stayed pretty much the same. We humans may have look at trees with sympathy, pitied their austere landscape for missing on fun and luxury of modern life.
Whenever it got chance, this enormous Nature defeats and humbles human mind. An easy example is Sea whose every aspect is beyond our grip. Also, remember the last time you looked through the window and got stuck by the soaked leaf caught in wind. This way Nature presents us these extreme version and both of these, for few moments, flushes our mind with humble emotion and also takes us to the edge of life, helps to transcend many our self created emotional limitation/boundaries like anger, jealousy etc.

Alternative Super-power?

US is the reigning super power and some are looking for an alternative. How good, sane are these potential candidates? Not that we need anything at all, but I have not yet seen the world without super-power, so I do not know.

In general, sovereign country’s policy could not be dictated by outsiders, this is very much true once the country rises to the throne of superpower because it becomes assertive, in worst case arrogant. So, only the Citizens that makeup the super-power can control the leader, and this makes Democracy a must-have attribute of super-power. And not just any kind of Democracy would do (a good example is Indian democracy), it should be a strong democracy with few of the following.
-A responsible and constructive opposition party that does not block everything blindly for plitical purpose. (India is a good example for not having one.)
-A constitution which is not just on paper but helps the Citizens. A strong judicial system must be present to apply the constitution. This is important because in Democracies like India, constitution is just a piece of paper, hardly rescues its citizens. Constitution should provide tools, by means of rights to dissect the internal and foreign policies of Govt. (Like, right to track Govt. records).

-A vocal but decent citizens who are not afraid to express their thoughts about Foreign policy, take part in debates and blogs. These citizens should be courageous enough to scrutinize Govt. to the hilt regarding Foreign affairs, and ask what it is doing to World.

I am not a Constitution professor, so whatever I wrote above is based on what I see around. As far as I know, none of the Asians countries have all of the above but there are few western countries that meet these requirements. Obviously US is a mature democracy with all these abilities. Here is an example, Govt wanted to prosecute the chauffer of Bin Laden and there were people in favor of severe sentence and people who advocated that chauffer is no Bin Laden. If the 9/11 had happened in India, it would have been hard to avoid physical threat if one were to advocate in favor of Bin Laden’s chauffer, but in US, citizens debated, blogged to acquit Bin Laden’s chauffer. And in the end, amidst the raging debate, US court awarded a minimum sentence to chauffer.

US off-stream media is full of foreign policy critics and conspiracy theorists; yes, those critics, bloggers may not bring policy change over night but important thing is that Govt. gave them the chance to express their voice; who knows their voice may make some one to really act. After listening to liberal media, I should say that worst critics of US are inside US.

US Govt. is arrogant but its citizens are mature enough to keep it on the leash, and citizens are Russia, China and India are not even anywhere close.