Vic Bishop, Staff Writer
Waking Times

When government controls a resource, that resource will be sold to the highest corporate bidder and will be exploited at the expense of any plants, animals or people living in the area. The battle for stewardship of our forests is one of the most important questions of our time, and in Indonesia, home to a significant portion of the world’s remaining rainforests, control of a number of disputed areas was recently returned to the indigenous populations which inhabit them.

As European colonialism in the 1800’s overtook the thousands of sprawling islands which now make up Indonesia, Dutch state rule over the millions of acres of forests in the region was hotly disputed, even flatly rejected, by many of the native tribes in the region. Having been a region of intense conflict for generations, a recent move by Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo will end clashes over this matter by returning authority of some rainforest areas to indigenous people.

Gary ‘Z’ McGee, Staff Writer
Waking Times

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” ~Voltaire

There are many different types of addiction, but perhaps the worst type is an addiction to unquestioned laws passed down from our forefathers and blindly followed. This type of addiction is detrimental, as it affects the world negatively in so many ways. When laws go unquestioned, there is a tendency for the power behind the laws to become entrenched. There is the tendency for people to become ignorant, complacent and even apathetic to the ways in which power corrupts. When laws go unquestioned, those with the power to write laws can use the monopoly on power to force the majority into believing in laws that would, under scrutiny, be viewed as invalid, unhealthy, unsustainable and even immoral.

by Claire Bernish, The Free Thought Project

First, Iceland, and now Spain has taken on the Big Bankers responsible for financial calamity, as the country’s highest national court charged the former head of Spain’s central bank, a market regulator, and five other banking officials over a failed bank leading to the loss of millions of euros for smaller investors.

This, of course, markedly departs from the mammoth taxpayer giveaway — commonly referred to as the bailout — approved by the U.S. government ostensively to “save” the Big Banks and, albeit unstated, allow the enormous institutions to continue bilking customers without the slightest fear of penalty.

Errant bankers and financiers, it would seem, typically manage to either evade actually being charged, or escape hefty fines and time behind bars.

Spain’s Supreme Court last year ruled “serious inaccuracies” in information about the listing led investors to back Bankia in error, thus the bank has since paid out millions of euros in compensation.

Nathaniel Mauka, Staff Writer
Waking Times

Exactly how long has the CIA been using psychic technology to interfere with geopolitics? Considering that most military industrial secrets are only revealed years, sometimes decades after they’ve been put into use, the recent unveiling of documents in a CIA database suggests some intriguing additions to their arsenal of mind-weapons.

Anna Hunt, Staff
Waking Times

One of the most common over-the-counter drugs used to reduce pain may also be decreasing your ability to be empathetic. Moreover, it may also stifle the magnitude of positive emotions such as joy.

A study out of Ohio State University has found that participants who took acetaminophen were less empathetic when they learned about the misfortunes of others. Acetaminophen is the common ingredient in Tylenol and is also present in hundreds of other medicines, both over-the-counter and prescription, according to the Consumer Healthcare Products Association (CHPA).

A substantial body of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research suggests that observing others experiencing pain, activates brain regions that are also activated during one’s own experience of pain. Therefore, the study’s researchers, Dominik Mischkowski, Baldwin Way and Jennifer Crocker, wanted to understand if something that reduced one’s pain also affects how one perceives others who are experiencing pain.