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48 Ways a Government Shutdown Will Screw You Over

by rpgf8m1 Posted on September 30, 2013

Mother Jones

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The government will shut down at midnight unless President Obama and Congress can agree on a temporary resolution to continue funding federal agencies. (Spoiler: They probably won’t.)

Here’s a quick guide to who and what will be most affected:

Anyone who might get sick: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would lack funding to support its annual flu vaccination program.

Military personnel: Barring last-minute congressional action, members of the armed forces would have their paychecks put on hold while they continue to work.

People who use boats: The Coast Guard will cut back on routine patrols and navigation assistance.

Civilian defense employees: 400,000 Department of Defense employees will be given unpaid vacations.

Family members of fallen soldiers: Death benefits for military families will be delayed.

Gun owners: During the 1990s shutdown, applications for gun permits were delayed due to furloughs at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Trees: Hundreds of US Forest Service workers face furloughs in California during peak forest fire season.

Visa applicants: Furloughs at the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs mean tens of thousands of visa applications are put on hold.

People traveling abroad: A shutdown would cause delays in the processing of passport applications.

Sick people: The National Institutes of Health will not admit new patients unless ordered by the director.

Factory workers: The Occupational Safety and Health Administration will halt regular inspections.

Hikers: All 401 National Park Service sites will be closed.

People who make money off tourists: Shuttered national parks are bad news for the hotels, restaurants, and other attractions that feed off them.

Small business loan applicants: The Small Business Administration will furlough 62 percent of its workforce.

Employers: The Department of Homeland Security’s e-Verify program will be offline for the duration of the shutdown.

Fountains: 45 of them will lose water.

People applying for mortgages: The Federal Housing Administration and the USDA won’t guarantee new loans.

Oil and gas exploration: The Bureau of Land Management will stop processing permits for oil and gas drilling on federal lands.

Chemical site facility security: Funding for Department of Homeland Security regulatory program ends October 4.

FOIA requests: The Social Security Administration says it won’t respond to Freedom of Information Act Requests during the shutdown.

Docents: All Smithsonian Institution museums in Washington, DC, will be closed.

@CuriosityRover: 98 percent of NASA’s staff will be furloughed, and the agency’s website and live-streams will go dark.

Renewable energy permits: The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management will stop all new offshore renewable-energy projects.

Campers: People living (or vacationing) in national parks and forests will have 48 hours to relocate.

Animal voyeurs: Watch the National Zoo’s Panda-cam while you still can.

Native Americans: The Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement will suspend oversight of active and abandoned coal mines “primarily in Tennessee and on Indian lands.”

Pesticide regulators: The Environmental Protection Agency will all but shut down at midnight.

Veterans pensions: The Department of Veterans Affairs says it will run out of funding for regular payment checks after a few weeks.

US Geological Survey researchers: The agency would stop most new scientific research and water analysis.

Disability payments: Although the VA will continue to provide medical care, disability payments may also be disrupted after a few weeks.

Winery permits: Couldn’t they take the wine coolers instead?

Ponies: The Bureau of Land Management’s wild horse and burro adoption programs would cease.

Infectious disease surveillance: The CDC will be unable to track outbreaks and monitor infectious diseases at a local level.

People on food assistance: The USDA’s Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) will stop making payments on October 1.

Food inspections: The Grain Inspection, Packers and Stockyards Administration warned of “inability to investigate alleged violations” due to a lack of funding; food imports will also go unexpected.

Automobile recall inspectors: “Routine defects and recall information from manufacturers and consumers would not be reviewed,” according to the Department of Transportation.

Food and drug safety research: The Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the FDA, will furlough 52 percent of its staff.

ARPA-E: The Department of Energy’s cutting-edge research arm—and one of the crowning legacies of the stimulus—will shut down, putting projects such as “squirtable batteries” on hold.

Nuclear Regulatory Commission: The agency could furlough more than 92 percent of its employees next week, with much of the remaining staff handling inspections.

People without heat: If the shutdown persists, it could affect the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which funds heating assistance programs.

Consumers: The Commodity Futures Trading Commission will furlough 652 of its 680 employees and maintain only a “bare minimum level of oversight and surveillance” to stop fraudulent practices.

People trying to pay taxes: The Internal Revenue Service will shutter its tax hotline, and stop processing tax payments.

College students: Cutbacks at the Department of Education could slow Pell grant and student-loan payments.

Economists: The Bureau of Economic Analysis will cut back on its data collection.

Welfare recipients: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families—welfare—runs out of funding on October 1, although individual states may pick up the tab.

Head Start: The child development program, already hammered by the effects of sequestration, will stop doling out new grants on October 1.

Air monitoring: A 94 percent reduction in staff won’t leave the EPA much room to enforce its new carbon regulations.

Golf: Courses at National Park Service sites will close for the shutdown. So at least we have that going for us.

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48 Ways a Government Shutdown Will Screw You Over

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I’m Too Young for This! – Suzanne Somers & Prudence Hall, M.D.

by Myrna Posted on September 24, 2013

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I’m Too Young for This!

The Natural Hormone Solution to Enjoy Perimenopause

Suzanne Somers & Prudence Hall, M.D.

Genre: Health & Fitness

Price: $13.99

Publish Date: September 24, 2013

Publisher: Crown Publishing Group

Seller: Random House, LLC


Why Wait to Feel Good Again? If you're in your thirties or forties, your body is changing, and so are your moods, sleep, health, and weight. Tired of being at the mercy of your hormones? Armed with the knowledge in this book, you don't have to be. Perimenopause can be enjoyable if you know what to do. I'm Too Young for This! details how you can get your body and mind back on track, safely and without drugs, including: – How our bodies transition hormonally—from puberty through perimenopause. – The common complaints of perimenopause—and hidden factors that may keep you symptomatic. – What are the minor and major hormones, and the important role they play in feeling good and staying vibrant and healthy. – What to eat—including Perimenopausal Power Foods—as well as other lifestyle shifts that are critical to your successful transition. – Cutting-edge research that proves the safety and efficacy of bioidentical hormone replacement (BHRT). – The Symptom Solver: a state-of-the-art guide to immediate relief for your hormonal complaints. Plus, how to find the right doctor as well as get your most frequently asked questions answered by expert hormone specialists. Your life is about to change for the better. You can feel great, be vibrant, healthy, thin, and sexy! This book shows you how.

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I’m Too Young for This! – Suzanne Somers & Prudence Hall, M.D.

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Fox News Asks Miss America About Those Racist Tweets

by um2rnxc Posted on September 18, 2013

Mother Jones

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Nina Davuluri, Miss America 2013 Prensa International Miss America/Ho

I felt terrible for Nina Davuluri this week after she was crowned Miss America 2013, because I knew what was coming. Davuluri is the first Indian-American woman to win the pageant. The moment that special tiara was lowered onto her fabulously coiffed head, a barrage of hateful, outraged, resentful, and predictably inaccurate tweets and posts came hurtling her way, hundreds at a time.

And my personal favorite: “WHEN WILL A WHITE WOMAN WIN #MISSAMERICA? Ever??!!” (The first nonwhite pageant winner was Norma Smallwood, of Cherokee descent, in 1926. It wouldn’t happen again until 1984, when Vanessa Williams became the first black Miss America. Not a bad streak!)

Norma Smallwood, Miss America 1926 Archival photo

Davuluri, whose parents are a software engineer and an OB/GYN from the north Indian state Andhra Pradesh, grew up in Oklahoma, and wants to become a cardiologist, went on Fox News this morning to talk about the hostility over her “race. . . and ethnicity. . . and everything,” as Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy put it.

“It was an unfortunate experience, but for each negative tweet, there were dozens of positive remarks and support,” said Davuluri. “A lot of that stemmed from ignorance, and that’s why my platform is so timely right now.”

Like presidents, Miss America candidates run on platforms. Davuluri’s is “celebrating diversity through cultural competency.” Cultural competency is that idea that everyone’s responsible for sorting through their own cultural biases and trying harder when it comes to interacting with different sorts of folks. It comes up a lot in conversations about public education and health care, places where people from different backgrounds cross paths regularly and have to (or should) make it work.

“I have always viewed Miss America as the girl next door, but for me the girl next door’s evolving as the diversity in America evolves,” said Davuluri on Fox & Friends. “It’s not who she was ten years ago, and she’s not going to be the same person ten years down the road.”

I cringe at the “girl next door” trope. I can’t stand the Miss America contest for that matter, for reasons many, many, many smart people have articulated well elsewhere. But if someone’s gonna go on Fox News and talk about being “Miss America,” I prefer Nina Davuluri at the podium.

This was hardly the first time the racist side of Twitter flipped its presumably ultrablonde wig over a person of color showing up in a familiar media space. When the character of Rue from The Hunger Games, described as “dark skinned” in the book, was played by the young black actress Amandla Stenberg, angry viewers took to Twitter to complain the movie had been “ruined.” When Cheerios released a commercial in which a little girl adorably pours cereal all over her (black) sleeping dad’s chest because her (white) mom said Cheerios is “heart healthy,” the company had to disable YouTube comments because thousands of Americans think it’s still 1966.

But all this trembling at the mere sight of little brown girls hasn’t stopped the rapid colorization of our country. So why bother bringing Davuluri’s attackers up at all? Because of the class-act performance she’s been delivering in the face of so much ugliness. She’s handling the ugly backlash with grace and poise, and working in some teachable moments along the way.

A few years ago, I made a promise to myself. I’d never again eat at an Indian restaurant where scenes of “traditional” Indian women were hung on the walls, rows and rows of doe-eyed women coyly hiding their smiles beneath gauzy scarves while performing traditional Indian activities such as pouring water from jugs and strumming wooden harps. I wouldn’t have held it against Nina Davuluri if she’d stuck to the high road, refusing to dignify ugly attacks with a forceful response. But it means a lot to me that she’s talking back.

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Fox News Asks Miss America About Those Racist Tweets

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After the Fire: The Uncertain Future of Yosemite’s Forests

by da3xs1z Posted on September 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the Wired website and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

For nearly two weeks, the nation has been transfixed by wildfire spreading through Yosemite National Park, threatening to pollute San Francisco’s water supply and destroy some of America’s most cherished landscapes. As terrible as the Rim Fire seems, though, the question of its long-term effects, and whether in some ways it could actually be ecologically beneficial, is a complicated one.

Some parts of Yosemite may be radically altered, entering entire new ecological states. Yet others may be restored to historical conditions that prevailed for for thousands of years from the last Ice Age’s end until the 19th century, when short-sighted fire management disrupted natural fire cycles and transformed the landscape.

In certain areas, “you could absolutely consider it a rebooting, getting the system back to the way it used to be,” said fire ecologist Andrea Thode of Northern Arizona University. “But where there’s a high-severity fire in a system that wasn’t used to having high-severity fires, you’re creating a new system.”

The Rim Fire now covers 300 square miles, making it the largest fire in Yosemite’s recent history and the sixth-largest in California’s. It’s also the latest in a series of exceptionally large fires that over the last several years have burned across the western and southwestern United States.

Fire is a natural, inevitable phenomenon, and one to which western North American ecologies are well-adapted, and even require to sustain themselves. The new fires, though, fueled by drought, a warming climate and forest mismanagement—in particular the buildup of small trees and shrubs caused by decades of fire suppression—may reach sizes and intensities too severe for existing ecosystems to withstand.

The Rim Fire may offer some of both patterns. At high elevations, vegetatively dominated by shrubs and short-needled conifers that produce a dense, slow-to-burn mat of ground cover, fires historically occurred every few hundred years, and they were often intense, reaching the crowns of trees. In such areas, the current fire will fit the usual cycle, said Thode.

Decades- and centuries-old seeds, which have remained dormant in the ground awaiting a suitable moment, will be cracked open by the heat, explained Thode. Exposed to moisture, they’ll begin to germinate and start a process of vegetative succession that results again in forests.

At middle elevations, where most of the Rim Fire is currently concentrated, a different fire dynamic prevails. Those forests are dominated by long-needled conifers that produce a fluffy, fast-burning ground cover. Left undisturbed, fires occur regularly.

“Up until the middle of the 20th century, the forests of that area would burn very frequently. Fires would go through them every five to 12 years,” said Carl Skinner, a U.S. Forest Service ecologist who specializes in relationships between fire and vegetation in northern California. “Because the fires burned as frequently as they did, it kept fuels from accumulating.”

A desire to protect houses, commercial timber and conservation lands by extinguishing these small, frequent fires changed the dynamic. Without fire, dead wood accumulated and small trees grew, creating a forest that’s both exceptionally flammable and structurally suited for transferring flames from ground to tree-crown level, at which point small burns can become infernos.

Though since the 1970s some fires have been allowed to burn naturally in the western parts of Yosemite, that’s not the case where the Rim Fire now burns, said Skinner. An open question, then, is just how big and hot it will burn.

Aerial diagram (above) and three-dimensional recreation (below) of 10-acre plot prior to logging in 1929 (left) and in 2008, after 79 years of fire suppression (right). USDA/USFS/Pacific Southwest Research Station

Where the fire is extremely intense, incinerating soil seed banks and root structures from which new trees would quickly sprout, the forest won’t come back, said Skinner.

Those areas will become dominated by dense, fast-growing shrubs that burn naturally every few years, killing young trees and creating a sort of ecological lock-in.

If the fire burns at lower intensities, though, it could result in a sort of ecological recalibration, said Skinner. In his work with fellow US Forest Service ecologist Eric Knapp at the Stanislaus-Tuolumne Experimental Forest, Skinner has found that Yosemite’s contemporary, fire-suppressed forests are actually far more homogeneous and less diverse than a century ago.

The fire could “move the forests in a trajectory that’s more like the historical,” said Skinner, both reducing the likelihood of large future fires and generating a mosaic of habitats that contain richer plant and animal communities.

“It may well be that, across a large landscape, certain plants and animals are adapted to having a certain amount of young forest recovering after disturbances,” said forest ecologist Dan Binkley of Colorado State University. “If we’ve had a century of fires, the landscape might not have enough of this.”

As of now it’s not known which parts of Yosemite have burned at tipping-point levels and which have stayed within historical, possibly rejuvenating parameters. That will become apparent in years to come. In the meantime, said Binkley, the Rim Fire and other megafires of recent years have demonstrated that fire should not always be fought.

“If you want to preserve something, you have to put it in a jar and pickle it. If you have a living forest, getting older and older, it’s not something we have an option to conserve in an unchanging way,” he said. “Some fires are going to be necessary if we want to sustain these old forests.”

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After the Fire: The Uncertain Future of Yosemite’s Forests

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‘Bee-Friendly’ Plants That Could Kill Bees

by Oliab719z Posted on August 16, 2013

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‘Bee-Friendly’ Plants That Could Kill Bees

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The 4-Hour Body – Timothy Ferriss

by Myrna Posted on July 19, 2013

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The 4-Hour Body

An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman

Timothy Ferriss

Genre: Health & Fitness

Price: $13.99

Publish Date: December 14, 2010

Publisher: Crown Publishing Group

Seller: Random House Digital, Inc. (Books)


Thinner, bigger, faster, stronger… which 150 pages will you read? Is it possible to: Reach your genetic potential in 6 months? Sleep 2 hours per day and perform better than on 8 hours? Lose more fat than a marathoner by bingeing? Indeed, and much more. This is not just another diet and fitness book. The 4-Hour Body is the result of an obsessive quest, spanning more than a decade, to hack the human body. It contains the collective wisdom of hundreds of elite athletes, dozens of MDs, and thousands of hours of jaw-dropping personal experimentation. From Olympic training centers to black-market laboratories, from Silicon Valley to South Africa, Tim Ferriss, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The 4-Hour Workweek, fixated on one life-changing question: For all things physical, what are the tiniest changes that produce the biggest results? Thousands of tests later, this book contains the answers for both men and women. From the gym to the bedroom, it’s all here, and it all works. YOU WILL LEARN (in less than 30 minutes each): How to lose those last 5-10 pounds (or 100+ pounds) with odd combinations of food and safe chemical cocktails. * How to prevent fat gain while bingeing (X-mas, holidays, weekends) * How to increase fat-loss 300% with a few bags of ice * How Tim gained 34 pounds of muscle in 28 days, without steroids, and in four hours of total gym time * How to sleep 2 hours per day and feel fully rested * How to produce 15-minute female orgasms * How to triple testosterone and double sperm count * How to go from running 5 kilometers to 50 kilometers in 12 weeks * How to reverse “permanent” injuries * How to add 150+ pounds to your lifts in 6 months * How to pay for a beach vacation with one hospital visit And that's just the tip of the iceberg. There are more than 50 topics covered, all with real-world experiments, many including more than 200 test subjects. You don't need better genetics or more discipline. You need immediate results that compel you to continue. That’s exactly what The 4-Hour Body delivers. From the Hardcover edition.

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The 4-Hour Body – Timothy Ferriss

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Your Weekend Longreads List on America’s Pastime

by pfyee4hn Posted on July 6, 2013

Mother Jones

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With the NBA and NHL seasons coming to their respective conclusions last month, and football still months away, baseball is the lone remaining major sport as America celebrates Independence Day. In its century and a half of existence, baseball has provided the country with a never-ending stream of heroes, villains, and plenty of folks who sit squarely in between. Below, we’ve rounded up some of our favorite pieces of long-form journalism about America’s complicated relationship with the national pastime.

For more long stories from Mother Jones check out our longreads archive. And, of course, if you’re not following @longreads and @motherjones on Twitter yet, get on that.

Baseball Without Metaphor | David Grann | The New York Times Magazine | September 2002

Barry Bonds may have been baseball’s most feared hitter—as well as its most hated. The reigning home run king was denied entry to the Hall of Fame this year thanks to his role as the central figure in the sport’s massive steroid scandal, raising questions about what we value in athletes and their on-field accomplishments.

Perhaps no one has been more ravaged by this new machine than Barry Bonds, the most dominant player of the modern era. At the very moment when Bonds is edging closer to the all-time home-run record, when in another age he would be lionized for his grace and strength, he has become a new kind of archetype—”The poster boy for the modern spoiled athlete” and ”a symbol of baseball’s creeping greed and selfishness, complete with diamond earring.”

Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu | John Updike | The New Yorker | October 1960

Another icon who had a love/hate relationship with his hometown fans, Ted Williams is considered one of the greatest hitters in Major League history even considering the seasons he missed while serving as a fighter pilot in the Korean War. His hatred for the Boston media and refusal to doff his cap to the fans became just as much a part of his legend as his batting crowns and All-Star game appearances.

The affair between Boston and Ted Williams has been no mere summer romance; it has been a marriage, composed of spats, mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing hoard of shared memories. It falls into three stages, which may be termed Youth, Maturity, and Age; or Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis; or Jason, Achilles, and Nestor.

Mourning Glory | Chris Ballard | Sports Illustrated | October 2012

Here, Ballard explores the small town of Williamsport, Md., where the deaths of two ballplayers three years apart loom large over high school baseball coach David Warrenfeltz and the rest of the local sports community.

In the months that followed, Warrenfeltz was haunted by his friend’s death. He wrestled with why this happened to Adenhart, not to him—why he was allowed to keep playing baseball when Nick couldn’t. Even years later Warrenfeltz would be driving and suddenly have to pull over, tears blurring his vision. Maybe that helps explain why he returned home after finishing college, to make a life in the place his friends once dreamed of leaving. Why he became a coach.

What’s It Like To Sing The Anthem At A Baseball Game? The Story Of One Man’s Perilous Fight | Drew Magary | Deadspin | July 2012

What could be more American than belting out the national anthem before a baseball game? It may be a minor league game, but Magary still makes it his patriotic mission to not screw up too badly.

AND THE ROCKETS’ RED GLAAAAARE …

Singing this part feels like jumping a motorcycle off a rising drawbridge. It’s just a straight crescendo, going up and up and up. If you trip anytime before “glare,” you’re fucking dead. You won’t make it.

Inside Major League Baseball’s Dominican Sweatshop System | Ian Gordon | Mother Jones | March/April 2013

Prospect Yewri Guillén died of a preventable bacterial infection at a Washington Nationals training academy in the Dominican Republic. It turns out the Nationals, along with many other MLB teams, have no certified trainers or doctors at their camps, where they risk the health of their Dominican ballplayers to bring cheap talent back to the US.

Guillén’s death is the worst-case scenario in a recruiting system that treats young Dominicans as second-class prospects, paying them far less than young Americans and sometimes denying them benefits that are standard in the US minor leagues, such as health insurance and professionally trained medical staff. MLB regulations allow teams to troll for talent on the cheap in the Dominican Republic: Unlike American kids, who must have completed high school to sign, Dominicans can be signed as young as 16, when their bodies and their skills are far less developed.

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Your Weekend Longreads List on America’s Pastime

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What If Your High School History Teacher Had Been Totally Wasted?

by colord8609 Posted on July 3, 2013

Mother Jones

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“History is written by the victors—but told best by the shit-faced.”

So reads a title card in an episode of Drunk History, the incredibly funny new Comedy Central show adapted from the eponymous web series. The premise is simple: Comedians, writers, and barflies are fed copious amounts of booze and then asked to narrate key scenes from American history, as costumed actors such as Jack Black and Zooey Deschanel fill in with lip-synched reenactments. The TV version—whose eight-episode first season premieres Tuesday, July 9, at 10 p.m. on both coasts—includes comedian Bob Odenkirk as Richard Nixon. And one of the web episodes is a fantastic account of the friendship between Abraham Lincoln (Will Ferrell) and Frederick Douglass (Oscar-nominated actor Don Cheadle). Watch:

So can we trust these sodden accounts of our national heritage?

“All stories are 100 percent fact-checked in advance,” promises Derek Waters, the show’s creator, executive producer, and featured actor. Each narrator is given notes to ensure a loosely tethered historical accuracy. Once the person has internalized these morsels of the past, he or she is bar-tended to in excess, and then they’re off. “We let them say whatever they want, but we don’t want anything that’s wrong,” Waters continues. “After all, we’re learning history here.” Actually, the casual flubs provide some of the show’s most amusing moments. One soused narrator substitutes soul icon James Brown for abolitionist John Brown. And in the clip above, the narrator briefly misidentifies Frederick Douglass as actor Richard Dreyfuss, and Abe Lincoln as Bill Clinton.

The whole idea for Drunk History was born of—what else?—liberal alcohol consumption. Out on the town one night, Waters and his friend Jake Johnson (Nick on the Fox comedy New Girl) began riffing about the singer Otis Redding and the circumstances of his 1967 death in a plane crash. Johnson started drunkenly reciting an urban legend about how Redding knew he was going to die before he boarded his doomed flight.

“He kept insisting that Otis said to his girlfriend, ‘No, I’m serious, you take care of yourself!’ before he got on the plane, and I was thinking ‘Oh, this is such bullshit,'” Waters recalls. “He was having so much trouble telling a story he truly believed was true, and I just started picturing this reenactment in which Otis Redding is staring at the camera being all like, ‘Shut the fuck up, this never happened.'”

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What If Your High School History Teacher Had Been Totally Wasted?

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Super Brain – Rudolph E. Tanzi & Deepak Chopra

by Myrna Posted on April 6, 2013

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Super Brain

Unleashing the Explosive Power of Your Mind to Maximize Health, Happiness, and Spiritual Well-Being

Rudolph E. Tanzi & Deepak Chopra

Genre: Health & Fitness

Price: $12.99

Publish Date: November 6, 2012

Publisher: Crown Publishing Group

Seller: Random House Digital, Inc. (Books)


A manual for relating to the brain in a revolutionary new way, Super Brain shows you how to use your brain as a gateway for achieving health, happiness, and spiritual growth. The authors are two pioneers: bestselling author and physician Deepak Chopra and Harvard Medical School professor Rudolph E. Tanzi, one of the world's foremost experts on the causes of Alzheimer’s. They have merged their wisdom and expertise for a bold new understanding of the “three-pound universe” and its untapped potential. In contrast to the “baseline brain” that fulfills the tasks of everyday life, Chopra and Tanzi propose that, through a person’s increased self-awareness and conscious intention, the brain can be taught to reach far beyond its present limitations. “We are living in a golden age for brain research, but is this a golden age for your brain?” they ask. Super Brain explains how it can be, by combining cutting-edge research and spiritual insights, demolishing the five most widespread myths about the brain that limit your potential, and then showing you methods to: -Use your brain instead of letting it use you -Create the ideal lifestyle for a healthy brain -Reduce the risks of aging -Promote happiness and well-being through the mind-body connection -Access the enlightened brain, the gateway to freedom and bliss -Overcome the most common challenges, such as memory loss, depression, anxiety, and obesity Your brain is capable of incredible healing and constant reshaping. Through a new relationship with your brain you can transform your life. In Super Brain , Chopra and Tanzi guide you on a fascinating journey that envisions a leap in human evolution. The brain is not just the greatest gift that Nature has given us. It’s the gateway to an unlimited future that you can begin to live today.

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Super Brain – Rudolph E. Tanzi & Deepak Chopra

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Tennessee Now in Tight Race for Wingnut Crown

by 9ji7g4x Posted on April 2, 2013

Mother Jones

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Tennessee, which appears to be giving South Carolina a serious run for the title of Wingnut Central, is now at the forefront of one of the tea party’s more peculiar pet rocks: repealing the 17th Amendment, by hook or by crook.

Why are they opposed to electing senators? Hard to say. It was a Bircher thing back in the 60s (Robert Welch was apparently convinced that it represented a poisonous concentration of power in the federal government), and now it’s a thing again. The names change, but the obsessions just go on and on. There’s probably no point in asking why.

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Tennessee Now in Tight Race for Wingnut Crown

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