Hello?
Is there anybody in there?
Just nod if you can hear me.
Is there anyone at home?
Come on, now,
I hear you're feeling down.
Well I can ease your pain
And get you on your feet again.
Relax.
I need some information first.
Just the basic facts
Can you show me where it hurts?

Pink Floyd - Comfortably Numb

As I observe the zombie like reactions of Americans to our catastrophic economic highway to collapse, the continued plundering and pillaging of the national treasury by criminal Wall Street bankers, non-enforcement of existing laws against those who committed the largest crime in history, and reaction to young people across the country getting beaten, bludgeoned, shot with tear gas and pepper sprayed by police, I can't help but wonder whether there is anyone home. Why are most Americans so passively accepting of these calamitous conditions? How did we become so comfortably numb? I've concluded Americans have chosen willful ignorance over thoughtful critical thinking due to their own intellectual laziness and overpowering mind manipulation by the elite through their propaganda emitting media machines. Some people are awaking from their trance, but the vast majority is still slumbering or fuming at erroneous perpetrators.

Both the Tea Party movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement are a reflection of the mood change in the country, which is a result of government overreach, political corruption, dysfunctional economic policies, and a financial system designed to enrich the few while defrauding the many. The common theme is anger, frustration and disillusionment with a system so badly broken it appears unfixable through the existing supposedly democratic methods. The system has been captured by an oligarchy of moneyed interests from the financial industry, mega-corporations, and military industrial complex, protected by their captured puppets in Washington DC and sustained by the propaganda peddling corporate media. The differences in political parties are meaningless as they each advocate big government solutions to all social, economic, foreign relations, and monetary issues.

For most people, an extended stay aboard a luxury cruise liner sounds like a dream vacation.

But Valeska Paris says she was held against her will aboard the Scientology cruise ship Freewinds for more than a decade. During her stay on the vessel, she alleges, she was forced into hard labor and never allowed to leave the ship without an escort.

In an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's (ABC News) Lateline program, Paris claims that Church of Scientology leader David Miscavige sent her to the ship when she was 18 in order to prevent her family from pulling her out of the organization.

Non-renewable energy continues to violate Earth and human rights everywhere it's drilled

Although cover-ups of the causes of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico "spill" and the recent Brazil spill are similar, unlike U.S. government treatment of the companies involved in the nation's largest eco-disaster that began with the April 20 deep sea oil rig explosion, Brazil has banned California-based Chevron from the nation and jail terms for officials are expected due to Big Energy's involvement with the oil spill that leaked some 2,400 barrels of oil into the sea off Rio de Janeiro on Nov. 8.

"The company's treatment of the regulatory agency and the Brazilian government was unacceptable," director of the ANP Magda Chambriard told Bloomberg.

"We had to go aboard the platform to search for the original images even after the company was notified to provide us with the video."

Last week, a group of students gathered at Zuccotti Park dressed in graduation robes and covered in chains to protest heavy college debts. Meanwhile, according to Salon.com, a Hunter College student burned his Sallie Mae loan bill in protest.

While burning a bill may not have quite the symbolic significance of burning a draft card, rumblings of a student debt revolt have been in the air for a little while. In perhaps the most blatant example, the chain wearing Zuccotti students announced the formation of the Occupy Student Debt Campaign. One campaign organizer, quoted by Fast Company, believes that her entire life has been destroyed by student loan debt.

Meanwhile, several prominent US companies are making a ton of money off of student loans. The Salon.com article lists the five biggest student lenders, starting with Sallie Mae, who currently own $151.4 billion in loans. They're followed by Wells Fargo, Discover, Nelnet, and JP Morgan Chase, all of whom own at least $10 billion dollars worth of debt.

More damningly, these lenders have been accused of engaging in several predatory practices. For example, its been suggested that Sallie Mae has made subprime loans to students attending for profit schools with high dropout rates. Wells Fargo has recently begun offering fixed rate loans but the percentages go as high as 14% for "those attending community colleges or trade schools, or in other words, for lower-income borrowers."

The Federal Reserve said Wednesday that it joined some of the world's major central banks in a coordinated action to inject liquidity into the global financial system as the euro zone's financial crisis threatens to squeeze credit worldwide.

Joining in the move were: the Fed, The Bank of Canada, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan and the European Central Bank, the Fed said.


"The purpose of these actions is to ease strains in financial markets and thereby mitigate the effects of such strains on the supply of credit to households and businesses and so help foster economic activity," the Fed said in a statement.

The central banks agreed to lower the pricing on current temporary U.S. liquidity swap arrangements by 50 basis points from Dec. 5. The move makes more dollars available to banks at a cheaper rate, thereby easing worries about the availability of funds to banks.

Another trading day and another low for Bank of America's stock.

Shares of Bank of America dropped more than 3 percent Tuesday, hitting a new 52-week low of $5.03 -- its lowest level since March 12, 2009.

It's been a tough year for the troubled bank, which has seen its share price decline roughly 62% from the start of the year.

Among other challenges, Bank of America has struggled under mounting issues related to its mortgage business.

The bank's rapidly declining share price is likely to increase pressure on the bank to slim down and sell assets. Bank of America has already said it plans to lay off 30,000 workers over the next several years.

Back in September, when that layoff announcement was made, investors worried about Bank of America's stock falling below a psychologically jarring level of $6. It dropped below that level on Oct. 3.

The bar keeps being lowered to new, more precarious thresholds. As Bank of America's shares hover near $5, they're still relatively far from the stock's all-time intraday low of $2.53 hit on Feb. 20, 2009.

A spokesperson for Bank of America said the bank does not comment on its share price.

Despite a rally in the stock market Tuesday, shares of most other major banks including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan Chase fell.

Banks face a double hit to costs and revenues from a spate of credit rating downgrades, another burden for a sector already struggling because of Europe's failure to deal decisively with its financial crisis.

Standard & Poor's on Tuesday cut its ratings on 15 big banks such as Bank of America Corp. and Morgan Stanley, as it seeks to give more insight into its methods and repair its reputation after the credit crisis.

But while the downgrades were driven by a revision of the agency's internal models and not because of a change in the banks, they will have a real impact on funding costs for the sector, already on edge because of Europe's debt crisis.

"It will likely raise concerns about their short term funding because they will be sidelined by money market funds who are the traditional buyers of that short-term paper," said Andrew Fraser, investment director at Standard Life.

Violent video games and other computer entertainment have long been criticised for damaging youngsters' brain.

But activists such as Oxford Professor Baroness Greenfield have often presented little science to back up their allegations.

However, extensive research into the subject has now provided worrying results that support her claims.

'Screen technologies cause high arousal which in turn activates the brain system's underlying addiction,' the neurologist said last month in an attack that accused games of causing 'dementia' in children.

'This results in the attraction of yet more screen-based activity.'

And now the first genuinely scientific attempt to analyse the emotive subject has thrown up astonishing results that suggest she is right.

Differences in brain activity between young men who played violent games and ones who didn't were visible in a randomly assigned sample in just one week.