At 12:10 p.m., Martin J. Gruenberg, Acting Chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), gave the keynote at the 48th Annual Conference on Bank Structure and Competition held by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. In the long-awaited speech, he outlined the overall vision, as well as the problems and pitfalls, of the FDIC using "resolution authority" to oversee the failure and unwinding of a Too Big To Fail financial firm. These powers were granted to the FDIC in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill in order to achieve both accountability and stability while avoiding the panic and contagion that occured in the fall of 2008.

At 2:15 p.m., House Republicans passed H.R. 5652, Paul Ryan's Sequester Replacement Reconciliation Act of 2012, by a vote of 218 to 199. This reconciliation act does many things; one is that it takes lots of money from poverty relief programs and gives it to the military, and another is that it renegs on automatic cuts that were agreed to as a result of the Super Committee's failure, which will almost certainly trigger a crisis on the next debt ceiling fight. But for our purposes, one specific thing it does is revoke Title II of Dodd-Frank, which is the resolution authority powers Gruenberg was presenting. It replaces them with nothing.

At 5 p.m., the large, systemically risky firm JP Morgan had a surprise conference call where it announced, following what was disclosed on its 10-Q, that it had a giant loss of $2 billion in the last quarter. This surprised the market and sent analysts running to their phones and computers.

The Roberts Court, it appears, will guarantee moneyed interests the freedom to raise and spend any amount, from any source, at any time, in order to win elections.

Fathers teach their sons and daughters what their "proper" roles are in dividing work at home, and mothers are all-too-often complicit--sometimes eagerly so--in the training. That in turn makes the extraordinary burden of motherhood a generational one, a curse passed down from patriarchal generation to patriarchal generation, ensuring Second Shifts well into the next several decades and beyond.

And that, more than anything Ann Romney or Hilary Rosen might say, is the gravest insult to motherhood.

So on this Mother's Day, the best gift both men and women can give to their mothers is this: a devout promise to help break the cycle, and to end the social and economic practices that lead to the Second Shift and the additional burden on motherhood.

“Hug the monster” is a metaphor taught by U.S. Air Force trainers to those headed into harm’s way.

The monster is your fear in a sudden crisis — as when you find yourself trapped in a downed plane or a burning house.

If you freeze or panic — if you go into merely reactive “brainlock” — you’re lost.

But if your mind has been prepared in advance to recognize the psychological grip of fear, focus on it, and then transform its intense energy into action — sometimes even by changing it into anger — and by also engaging the thinking part of your brain to work the problem, your chances of survival go way up.

Around the world, a growing number of people are showing signs of hugging the monster of what the world’s experts have plainly shown to be a great crisis facing us all.