Cynicism is, to some extent, a form of utilitarian filtering. Contracting your beliefs, you filter out things that you see as likely to lead nowhere strategically, and focus on the practical. This filtering can help you accomplish more because it narrows the scope of your existance. It can also kill your creativity because you're effectively removing yourself from the inspiring and informative compost heap of evolutionary participation. At the root of cynicism is a lack of faith in the evolutionary process. You may accomplish more, but very likely more of the same.
Openness, alternatively, connects one to the process of evolutionary collective computation. The quality of the connection is dependent on personal development.
An very well done Dutch (?) television segment discusses a number of 9/11 theories and interviews journalists and editors from mainstream and new media.
With a down payment of $124 million, Larry Silverstein entered a 99 year lease of the World Trade Center buildings only 2 months before the 9/11 attacks. Although thousands of people lost their lives in the attacks, Larry may do well in the end as he is fighting for over $7 billion in insurance claims.
US President Bush today acknowledged the existance of a network of secret overseas prisons and urged congress to pass laws that will make sham trials legal. The Supreme Court previously ruled that military tribunals are not legal.
The tribunals promoted by Bush will pay no heed to the right to a fair trial, allowing the use of "hearsay and coerced testimony and for secret evidence". These tribunals will, in effect, allow the US to arbitrarily sentence foreign nationals to death with no real evidence.
A couple of unfortunate hippies were sentenced to 6 months in jail for dumpster-diving "five cucumbers, four or five apricots, two bundles of asparagus spears and a handful of cherries from a garbage can at Sweet Pea Produce".