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Love and Hate

Intellipoop.com

Quote: I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Report: Bush surveillance program was massive

Report: Bush surveillance program was massive

Posted on 7/10/2009

A team of federal inspectors general reported Friday that the Bush administration built an unprecedented surveillance operation to pull in mountains of information far beyond the warrantless wiretapping previously acknowledged.

The report questions the legal basis for the effort but it shielded almost all details on grounds they're still too secret to reveal.

Unprecedented Collection Activities
The report, compiled by five inspectors general, refers to "unprecedented collection activities" by U.S. intelligence agencies under an executive order signed by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Few Relevant Officials Knew
The report says too few relevant officials knew of the size and depth of the program, let alone signed off on it.

They particularly criticize John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general who wrote legal memos undergirding the policy.

John Ashcroft Unaware till March 2004
His boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft, was not aware until March 2004 of the exact nature of the intelligence operations beyond wiretapping that he had been approving for the previous two and a half years.

Read the AP story

The danger of power

Thom Hartmann | News, Debate and Opinion « Intellipoop.com
The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power — Franklin D. Roosevelt

How happiness is affected by the number of our choices

Updates: Whatever Happened to Hubble's Last Fix?: Scientific American

More Choices, More Happiness?
Having too many options can leave people less happy with the decisions they ultimately make [see “The Tyranny of Choice”; SciAm, April 2004]. Experiments described in the March Psychology and Marketing attempt to reconcile those findings with theories from psychology and economics that equate more choices with greater satisfaction. In one test, participants had to pick a charity to which to donate money from a list of either five or 40 organizations. The study found no evidence of the too-much-choice effect even in the more plentiful option, except when participants were asked to justify their picks. Under those circumstances, they seemed less satisfied with their decisions, because they had to recall the choices they could have made. The researchers suggest that the too-much-choice effect may occur only under certain conditions and is less robust than previously thought. —Kathryn Wilcox

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"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy". -- James Madison.

Thom Hartmann | News, Debate and Opinion

Thom Hartmann | News, Debate and Opinion: "The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power — Franklin D. Roosevelt"