Thinking can be dangerous -- thoughts can go anywhere. Maybe that is why so little thinking is done any longer by the masses.
This is especially true, given the vast array of predigested information sources available to the various publics which still clot and cling together, despite our vast differences, as we start to exit our country's Terrible Twos, as the perspective of world history goes.
Our brains now scurry and scramble for their allotment of junk-food information, whether fresh or stale, direct from the squeeze-tubes of right wing think tanks, from the boiling vats of corporately-cooked fodder, from the overstuffed pork barrels of stout political earmarks.
Alex Baer: ... And Now, th' Snooze
Alex Baer: Survivor's Gilt
It's a wonderful thing, when stuff normally taken for granted goes missing for a bit, then pops back up, reasserts itself, and gets appreciation flowing in your veins again.
Like gravity.
Toward the end of the end of my month-long experimentation with colds, flus, and pneumonia-wannabes, I was thrilled when all those sumpy pockets and pools of rippling gravity faded from the swooping and swerving, eerily unfamiliarly, looking-through-binoculars-backwards, miles-long hallway between bed and bath -- into the Great Beyond, where all the cold and flu products danced in a long conga line, like a 1950s theater intermission moment, when all the popcorn, drinks, and candy bars danced themselves out into the lobby for your happy, refreshing treat.
Radioactive Water From Fukushima Is Leaking Into the Pacific
"Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind," Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, told Truthout shortly after a 9.0 earthquake in Japan caused a tsunami that destroyed the cooling system of Tokyo Electric Power Company's (TEPCO) nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan.
While this statement might sound overdramatic, Gundersen may be right.
Several nuclear reactor meltdowns in the plant, which at the time forced the mandatory evacuations of thousands of people living within a 15-mile radius of the damaged power plant, persist, and experts like Gundersen continue to warn that this problem is not going to go away.
How David Petraeus avoided felony charges and possible prison time
Inside a secure conference room on the 6th floor of the Justice Department in early 2014, top federal law enforcement officials gathered to hear what criminal charges prosecutors were contemplating against David H. Petraeus, the storied wartime general and former CIA director whose public career had ended about 15 months earlier over an extramarital affair.
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and FBI Director James B. Comey listened as prosecutors did a mock run through the government's case, a preview of how they would present their evidence to Petraeus' lawyers in order, they hoped, to force a guilty plea.
What Donald Rumsfeld Knew We Didn’t Know About Iraq
On September 9, 2002, as the George W. Bush administration was launching its campaign to invade Iraq, a classified report landed on the desk of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It came from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and it carried an ominous note.
“Please take a look at this material as to what we don’t know about WMD,” Rumsfeld wrote to Air Force General Richard Myers. “It is big.”
The report was an inventory of what U.S. intelligence knew—or more importantly didn’t know—about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Its assessment was blunt: “We’ve struggled to estimate the unknowns. ... We range from 0% to about 75% knowledge on various aspects of their program.”
West Bank teen killed after trying to stab guard
A 13-year-old Palestinian girl was fatally shot by police after she reportedly rushed at a guard brandishing a knife.
According to police spokeswoman Luba Samri, Ruqayya Eid Abu Eid left her home in the village of Anata early Saturday after fighting with her family. She allegedly left home carrying a knife "intending to die." Around 8 a.m., she arrived at the settlement of Anatot, about a mile away. She allegedly ran towards the civilian guard at the entrance, who opened fire. The New York Times reported security footage appeared to confirm Samri's statement.
Stephen Hawking: Human race is in danger, and it's our fault
Science superstar Stephen Hawking says humanity is inching closer to demise, and we are to blame.
The physicist made the comments during the annual BBC Reith lecture, and said it’s inevitable that in the next “thousand or ten thousand years,” a disaster will strike the planet.
"By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race,” he said during the BBC lecture.
Officers who rape: The police brutality chiefs ignore
It was 1 a.m. on a Monday in March 2013 when Bronx resident Erica Noonan, 31, saw flashing blue lights in her mirror. She was driving home and figured it had to be a mistake. She hadn’t been speeding, she says.
Carlos Becker, the officer who stopped her, says otherwise. Not only had she been driving too fast, but she’d changed lanes without signaling and had run a red light, and her breath smelled of alcohol. He administered a breath test and then arrested her for drunk driving. (Noonan denies that any of Becker’s reasons for stopping her were true — she hadn’t had anything to drink and broke no traffic laws, according to her lawyer.)
Egregious safety failures at Army lab led to anthrax mistakes
A brigadier general who led an Army biodefense lab in Utah is among a dozen individuals facing potential disciplinary actions — including loss of jobs — for egregious failures that contributed to the facility mistakenly shipping live anthrax to other labs for more than a decade, according to the military’s accountability investigation report that was provided to USA TODAY.
“Over time, you see there is complacency that the leadership should have recognized and taken action to correct,” Maj. Gen. Paul Ostrowski, who led the review team, said in an interview.
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