Fear on the brain

At Time Magazine, Maia Szalavitz writes that fear "hijacks the brain."

"Fear short circuits the brain, especially when it hits close to home, experts say— making coping with events like the bombings at the Boston Marathon especially tricky. . . . This dramatically alters how we think, since the limbic system is deeply engaged with modulating our emotions. [W]hen people are terrorized, [p]roblem solving becomes more categorical, concrete and emotional [and] we become more vulnerable to reactive and short-sighted solutions."

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Corporate personhood argument fails in Pennsylvania court case

Steven Rosenfeld writes at Alternet:

A Pennsylvania judge in the heart of the Keystone State’s fracking belt has issued a forceful and precedent-setting decision holding that there is no corporate right to privacy under that state’s constitution, giving citizens and journalists a powerful tool to understand the health and environmental impacts of natural gas drilling in their communities.

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U.S. warmongering continues to drain the budget

At Huffpo, Jeff Cohen writes:

Today there's an elephant in the room: a huge, yet ignored, issue that largely explains why Social Security is now on the chopping block. And why other industrialized countries have free college education and universal healthcare, but we don't. It's arguably our country's biggest problem -- a problem that Martin Luther King Jr. focused on before he was assassinated 45 years ago, and has only worsened since then (which was the height of the Vietnam War). That problem is U.S. militarism and perpetual war. In 1967, King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" -- and said, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." . . . What our mainstream media so obediently call the "War on Terror" is experienced in other countries as a U.S. war of terror -- kidnappings, night raids, torture, drone strikes, killing and maiming of innocent civilians -- that creates new enemies for our country.

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Elizabeth Warren tells the OCC and the Fed that their job is not to hide evidence of lawbreaking

Senator Elizabeth Warren educates Daniel P. Stipano, Deputy Chief Counsel, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Richard Ashton, Deputy General Counsel, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve. They look surprised that they should actually be looking out to help out victims of the banks and not helping the banks to hide evidence of law-breaking by those banks that conducted illegal foreclosures. Thank goodness we have Senator Warren on the job.

Continue ReadingElizabeth Warren tells the OCC and the Fed that their job is not to hide evidence of lawbreaking