Doublethink

Under George W. Bush, the United States has not lived up to its historic role as a leader in the Western Hemisphere. As president, I will restore that leadership by working to advance the common prosperity and security of all of the people of the Americas. That work must begin with a renewed strategic partnership with Mexico.

Doctors, teachers and social workers will be told to act as informers to identify potential violent offenders for monitoring by the police and other agencies. Ministers hope that by spotting binge-drinkers, drug addicts and young gang members early before they commit serious crimes they can be placed on a national database and steered away from offending behaviour.

If speeches were sifted by famous last words, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s opening remarks on Wednesday would stand out. After a spirited defence of American foreign policy and the following question session, she recounted something she says she tells herself very often: “Today’s headlines are rarely the same as history’s judgments.” Rice took the podium promising not be dull and longwinding while explaining America’s ideals. She was not.

The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Al Qaeda operatives in the agency's custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about the CIA's secret detention program, according to current and former government officials.

At the beginning of this school year, school pupils in Russia will be getting a new history textbook in which the policies of Josif Stalin are portrayed in a positive light, and which offers an interesting interpretation of the Finnish-Soviet Winter War of 1939 - 1940.

The Federation of American Scientists' director of the nuclear information project Hans Kristensen reports that he has gotten ahold of a surprising document that shows the Bush White House guided the US military to change the US nuclear posture in 2002 to develop nuclear strike plans against rogue states, including North Korea, Iran and Iraq.

"The Technocratic Age is slowly designing an every day more controlled society. The society will be dominated by an elite of persons free from traditional values (!) who will have no doubt in fulfilling their objectives by means of purged techniques with which they will influence the behavior of people and will control and watch the society in all details". "... it will become possible to exert a practically permanent watch on each citizen of the world". - Zbigniew Brzezinski, Illuminati and co-founder of Trilateral Commission

George Orwell was born in 1903 and died in 1950 after a long struggle with tuberculosis. Early in life he learned to be suspicious of authority and to hate empire while developing a compassion for the poor. In 1936 he joined the Spanish Civil War, like thousands of volunteers who joined the Lincoln Brigade to fight on the side of the republic against fascist Gen. Francisco Franco and his Falange Party. More than half of the volunteers died in battle. Orwell was injured and nearly died.

ess than two weeks after Microsoft Corp. announced plans to support online personal health information records, Google unveiled plans to follow suit. Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products and user experience, said Wednesday here at the Web 2.0 Summit that Google plans to support the "storage and movement" of people's health records.