Guns, of Course, but What About Mental Illness?

Although gun policy is certainly important to talk about in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook tragedy, mental illnesses may be more crucial to discuss; President Obama fed the loyal Susan Rice to the sharks for the same reasons he’s both feared and admired; meanwhile, education is becoming a commodity rather than a right thanks to the neoliberal agenda. These discoveries and more below.

On a regular basis, Truthdig brings you the news items and odds and ends that have found their way to Larry Gross, director of the USC Annenberg School for Communication. A specialist in media and culture, art and communication, visual communication and media portrayals of minorities, Gross helped found the field of gay and lesbian studies.

‘I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother’: A Mom’s Perspective On The Mental Illness Conversation In America Liza Long, a writer based in Boise, says it’s easy to talk about guns. But it’s time to talk about mental illness.

U.S. Terrorism Agency to Tap a Vast Database of Citizens Top U.S. intelligence officials gathered in the White House Situation Room in March to debate a controversial proposal.

Whoa: Physicists testing to see if universe is a computer simulation Will you take the red pill or the blue pill?

Why gun controls are off the agenda in America What is it about Americans and guns?

Why Obama Betrayed Susan Rice She has been loyal to the president from the start. But at the first sign of trouble, Obama bails on her bid to succeed Hillary.

Noam Chomsky Post-Election: We Need More Organization, Education, Activism Noam Chomsky weighs in on the lessons to take away from the 2012 elections.

Social Networking Popular Across Globe Social networking has spread around the world with remarkable speed.

The making of a Right to Work state Mainstream economists, to judge by the blogs and columns I’ve been looking at in recent days, don’t seem to have much to say about the recent decision to make Michigan a Right to Work state.

Rearranging the Deck Chairs on the Republican Titanic It’s barely a month since Election 2012 put Barack Obama back in the White House and Mitt Romney in the Republican doghouse (or even perhaps on the roof of the GOP’s family car).

The Vile Maxim, the Deficit Fetish, and the Unelected Dictatorship It’s useful to step back from the dominant terms in political play to examine what’s really going on behind misleading language.

Is Education a Human Right or a Privilege for the Wealthy? Over the last 40 years, higher education in the United States has been transformed into a commodity that produces automatons to serve big-finance capitalism, prevents campuses from being a source of societal transformation and creates modern indentured servants through debt slavery.