NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

The pay raise controversy is now largely moot, but it did bring up some very important points about governance and about the connection or lack of connection that people feel to their governments in a democracy. In a democratic society, the government is supposed to represent the people, but that responsibility that people have is sometimes rejected, primarily because people want to cover their apathy or their lack of engagement. They complain more ferociously because they are not engaged, because they may not actually know what is going on. This does not mean that their critiques are not without merit, but only that they are often not very productive because the passion or conviction with which they are spoken has no bearing to how effective they are, or how much those critiquing actually understand. It was intriguing in this controversy to see how so many people would direct their ire to the Guam Legislature, simply because they were the ones doing the listening. The

US nearly detonated atomic bomb over North Carolina – secret document Exclusive: Journalist uses Freedom of Information Act to disclose 1961 accident in which one switch averted catastrophe by Ed Pilkington The Guardian/UK   A secret document, published in declassified form for the first time by the Guardian today, reveals that the US Air Force came dramatically close to detonating an atom bomb over North Carolina that would have been 260 times more powerful than the device that devastated Hiroshima. The document , obtained by the investigative journalist Eric Schlosser under the Freedom of Information Act, gives the first conclusive evidence that the US was narrowly spared a disaster of monumental proportions when two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs were accidentally dropped over Goldsboro, North Carolina