Saturday, Nov 23rd
Last update08:46:49 AM GMT
A city police chief who led an investigation into charges that Britain cooperated with secret CIA flights to transport terrorism suspects without formal proceedings has been found dead, his deputy said Tuesday.
Manchester Chief Constable Michael Todd, 50, was found dead in Snowdonia, about 240 miles northwest of London, Deputy Chief Constable Dave Whatton said. He had been missing since going out for a walk Monday during his day off.
TVNL Comment: Just like David Kelly.
The shrinking public attention span fostered by video is closely tied to the second important anti-intellectual force in American culture: the erosion of general knowledge.
People accustomed to hearing their president explain complicated policy choices by snapping "I'm the decider" may find it almost impossible to imagine the pains that Franklin D. Roosevelt took, in the grim months after Pearl Harbor, to explain why U.S. armed forces were suffering one defeat after another in the Pacific. In February 1942, Roosevelt urged Americans to spread out a map during his radio "fireside chat" so that they might better understand the geography of battle. In stores throughout the country, maps sold out; about 80 percent of American adults tuned in to hear the president.
That leads us to the third and final factor behind the new American dumbness: not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it's the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism -- a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse.
Martina Navratilova, the former world number one tennis star, said yesterday that she had regained Czech nationality more than 30 years after fleeing its communist rule to live in the US.
Navratilova said last year that while she was once ashamed about Czechoslovakia, she was now ashamed of the United States under Mr Bush. “The thing is that we elected Bush. That is worse! Against that, nobody chose a communist government in Czechoslovakia,” she told the Czech daily Lidove Noviny.
The more that you are kept in the dark, either due to your own lack of inquisitiveness or the workings of an unscrupulous industry (such as the food industry that markets junk foods and soda to children as though it is something they should be consuming), the easier you are to manipulate.
And this is where a population of people who do not possess their own knowledge base will easily believe, for instance, that they must quickly get vaccinated to protect themselves against an imaginary pandemic like the bird flu, or that food from their local supermarket is somehow safer than food grown by a farmer down the road.
A five-month Associated Press investigation has determined that trace amounts of many of the pharmaceuticals we take to stay healthy are seeping into drinking water supplies, and a growing body of research indicates that this could harm humans.
But people aren't the only ones who consume that water. There is more and more evidence that some animals that live in or drink from streams and lakes are seriously affected.
An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's al Qaida terrorist network.
TVNL Comment: And this is news? We knew this since the first Gulf War. There had never been any evidence linking the two and as a matter of fact it was pretty well known that they were enemies!
A US Congress-appointed committee on Gulf War illnesses analysed more than 100 studies in the research.
It found evidence linking the problems to a particular class of chemicals.
These were an anti-nerve gas agent given to troops, pesticides used to control sand-flies, and the nerve-gas sarin that troops may have been exposed to during the demolition of a weapons depot.
I submit to you that a state of lawlessness has been on-going since the day George Bush took office on January 20, 2001. If Congress can't get the Federal Department of Justice to respond to questions and cooperate with investigations that are clearly the job of Congress and the sitting president is part of these cover ups, then who is going to stop this lawless administration?
President Bush quietly has claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans’ mail without a judge’s warrant.
Bush asserted the new authority Dec. 20 after signing legislation that overhauls some postal regulations. He then issued a “signing statement” that declared his right to open mail under emergency conditions, contrary to existing law and contradicting the bill he had just signed, according to experts who have reviewed it.
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