The Urge to End It - Understanding Suicide - NYTimes.com

The Urge to End It - Understanding Suicide - NYTimes.com: "Quite inadvertently, the British gas conversion proved that the incidence of suicide across an entire society could be radically reduced, upending the conventional wisdom about suicide in the process. Or rather it should have upended the conventional wisdom, for what is astonishing today is how little-known the British coal-gas story is even among mental-health professionals who deal with suicide."

#suicide
#coalgas

James Wolcott: Republicans Looking for Love in All the Right Places | Politics | Vanity Fair

Hilarious essay from Vanity Fair:

James Wolcott: Republicans Looking for Love in All the Right Places | Politics | Vanity Fair: "It is a time of great frustration for the Republican groundlings. Obama looks so beatable, so exposed in the clearing. They can taste his vulnerability on their wolf chops, the savory possibility of making him a one-term wonder—Jimmy Carter redux. But Carter was defeated by the mountain majesty of Ronald Reagan, and although every Republican contender invokes Reagan as second only to God in the firmament, bronzing their videos with the lambent earth tones of Reaganesque morning light, none of the dude ranchers competing can quite fill his cowboy boots."

The Joke Is On Us

The real joke is that so-called journalists are pandering for ratings by shoving a picture of a summer sausage stuffed into cotton underwear. I guess all we needed to stop the Iraq war was to fake a photo of Shrubya's dong and post it on the internet. Except no one would believe he knew how to use a computer.


#wienergate

Five myths about federal workers

Five myths about federal workers

_____

Still the Best Congress Money Can Buy- Frank Rich - NYTimes.com

Still the Best Congress Money Can Buy - NYTimes.com: "If prayer hasn’t cured this highly prayerful nation by now, it may be because our body politic has long since developed an immunity to it."

Frank Rich

More Depressing News But At Least It's Not About The FaceBook Movie

Op-Ed Columnist - Hey, Small Spender - NYTimes.com: "But if they won’t say it, I will: if job-creating government spending has failed to bring down unemployment in the Obama era, it’s not because it doesn’t work; it’s because it wasn’t tried."

And a notable comment:

"For years Krugman has heroically, and patriotically, attempted to explain our deepening predicament using reason, facts, analysis and logic. But these cut no ice with a large minority of the American people, who prefer guns, bibles and political charlatans. It's striking that his penetrating, relentless and beautifully-written columns no longer attract even token argument from the right. It's thisl imbalance, this total lack of normal debate between the 2 sides, that depresses one most. It's like watching a game of tennis between Nadal and a frog, with the frog winning".

Fucking Hell

Study Shows How the Innocent Confess to Crimes - NYTimes.com: "After his initial confession, he said, the interrogators went over the crime with him in detail — asking how he did it, but correcting him when he got the facts wrong. How did he get in? “I said, ‘I kicked in the front door.’” But the rapist had used the back door, so he admitted to having gone around to the back. “They fed me the answers,” he recalled."

NOW YOU'RE TALKING CRAZY TALK

Ted Koppel: Nine years after 9/11, let's stop playing into bin Laden's hands

911
bin-laden

Mosque Mania (Frank Rich Weighs In)

Appropriated from Rich and the NY Times, sorry.

Poor General Petraeus. Over the last week he has been ubiquitous in the majornewspapers and on television as he pursues a publicity tour to pitch the war he’s inherited. But have you heard any buzz about what he had to say? Any debate? Any anything? No one was listening and no one cared. Everyone was too busy yelling about the mosque.

It’s poignant, really. Even as America’s most venerable soldier returned from the front to valiantly assume the role of Willy Loman, the product he was selling was being discredited and discontinued by his own self-proclaimed allies at home.

Taliban Motorcycle Gangs Running Roughshod; Highway Patrol Nowhere In Sight

Taliban takes hold in once-peaceful northern Afghanistan

Whatever happened to those guys who used to fight the Taliban? Did they all leave?

Could Not Have Said It Better Myself (Another reader's comment)

Yes, this guy. Again.

A comment from driftglass at: The Long Strategy - Readers' Comments - NYTimes.com, re: "The Long Strategy", David Brooks, nytimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/opinion/27brooks.html

Except, of course, you are not a liberal or a Democrat. You are the carefully bland, studiedly tepid apologist for a depraved and failed ideology whose livelihood depends entirely on continuing to pretend that there is some reservoir of "reasonableness" remaining w/in the Conservative Movement with could be activated IF ONLY the Left would just keep compromising over and over and over and over again. This is a lie. It has been a lie for 30 years. You know it is a lie. Your colleagues know it is a lie. Everyone who pays attention to politics knows it is a lie. And yet week in, week out, you continue to get paid very handsomely to dress up in a costume, put on makeup and tell your paying customers things which both of you damn well know are not true.

Was there ever a more succinct definition of "whore" than that?

Stupid Pointless Violence Even More Stupid And Pointless Than Previously Thought

General Area of Pointless Violence
Fear And Death (above)

View Is Bleaker Than Official Portrayal of War in Afghanistan - NYTimes.com

Women’s Role in Holocaust May Exceed Old Notions - NYTimes.com

Women’s Role in Holocaust May Exceed Old Notions - NYTimes.com