Today’s inspiration for the QOTD comes from the Jack London quote;
“To be able to forget means sanity.”
I don’t know the context of that quote, so I don’t understand his true intent.
If he means that we should forget any pains against us caused by others — to forgive and forget — that’s terrific. Or, maybe he means we should just forget all the bullshit we encounter daily in this sick world, and enjoy life’s goodness. That’s terrific also.
Continue reading “Stucky QOTD: Suicide (yours)”
Trump has come out calling the Vince Foster “suicide” very “fishy” to say the least. It has long been talked about behind the curtain that Vince Foster was murdered in the White House and his body was then moved to a park to ensure the non-controllable police would not have jurisdiction. The murder was neatly called a suicide claiming Foster was prescribed the anti-depressant medication Trazodone over the phone by his Arkansas doctor, but a small dose that would not have helped. The next day, Foster was found dead in Fort Marcy Park, a federal park in Virginia where jurisdiction could be controlled.
Vince Foster was from the Rose Law firm and knew everything about the Clintons. He was very upset about the investigation into them and was deeply afraid of having to testify. He appears to have been murdered in the White House and his body was then moved to the federal park. Foster was found with a gun in his hand and gunshot residue on that hand. An autopsy determined that he was shot in the mouth and no other wounds were found on his body. But that was just the start of the cover-up. What was withheld, according to investigators I personally know on Capitol Hill, was the fact that a piece of his head where the bullet came out the back was not there. This suggested his body had been removed. But that was just for starters.
Patrick Knowlton is the man who found Foster’s body who disagreed with the “official” facts of Kenneth Star, special government prosecutor investigating the Clintons. Star actually objected to allowing Knowlton’s comments being made as part of any report trying to suppress anything that disagreed with the “official” version. Judge John D. Butzner wrote to Judges Peter Fay and David Sentelle after Knowlton submitted a motion that his comments be included as part of an appendix to the final report.
Hat tip Francis Marion
Recently there was an amateur art contest in the Netherlands, and people were invited to create a work of art depicting the current era of multiculturalism in Europe — a depiction of their experience in the modern ‘melting pot’. This was the winner:
Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
Police were also vague about the sign, saying only that it related to “social justice.” Bishop said two others who witnessed the shooting told him that it said, “Tax the one percent,” and that he seemed to raise it just before pulling the trigger.
Jim White was at the Capitol Visitor Center when the announcement of the lockdown came over the loudspeaker. He said there was no panic, just chatter about what could be going on outside. His 1:30 p.m. tour went on as scheduled. The only indication that something was amiss: The tour guide kept stretching and extending his talk.
Bernard called the incident “a bit unfortunate,” especially with all the tourists in town to see the cherry blossoms.
Yes, so unfortunate that someone blowing their brains out potentially due to economic serfdom got in the way of cherry blossom selfies.
– From the post: Illinois Man Commits Suicide in Front of U.S. Capitol Holding a “Tax the 1%” Sign
Continue reading “US Suicide Rate Soars In 21st Century – Up 80% For Middle-Aged White Women”
This guy was once a superstar on Wall Street. He made billions as the founder of Chesapeake Energy. His hubris led him to borrow tens of millions on margin to buy his own stock. When oil prices collapsed in 2008/2009, the margin calls wiped him out. He ended up leaving the company he founded in disgrace. They are headed towards bankruptcy, as he loaded the company up with debt to buy shale properties. Yesterday he gets indicted for rigging bids for land purchases. He decides he isn’t going to spend his final days in prison, so he accelerates his vehicle into a bridge abutment and commits suicide. It can’t be proven, so his family probably gets a huge life insurance payment.
Aubrey McClendon, the co-founder of Chesapeake Energy Corp (CHK.N) who led it to become one of the world’s biggest natural gas producers before he was tarred by federal anti-trust charges, died on Wednesday in a car accident in Oklahoma City, police said. He was 56.
McClendon died one day after the U.S. Department of Justice indicted him for allegedly violating antitrust laws by colluding to rig bids for oil and gas acreage while he was at Chesapeake, which has been a central player in the U.S. fracking revolution of the past decade. He denied the charges.
McClendon resigned from Chesapeake in 2013 after a corporate governance crisis and investor concerns over his heavy spending.
Hat tip Francis Marion
It looks like cranky middle aged white dudes are keeling over at an increasing rate. It looks like Obama’s master plan is working. He’s pissed off so many middle aged white people, they are drinking themselves to death and committing suicide at an increasing rate. Black and Hispanic death rates continue to decline.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say the ongoing recession we have been experiencing since 2000 has affected middle aged white people more than any other demographic. Their participation in the labor force is now at an all-time low. For many of these people, their jobs were what provided their self-esteem and purpose in life, along with the income. As their standard of living has methodically declined, they have turned to drugs and alcohol to drown their sorrows, and some have decided it isn’t worth living in this society anymore.
Anger, depression and losing your purpose in life are a bad combo. I’m sure Obama will announce a program to help middle aged white people in the coming days. Right?
By BETSY MCKAY
White, middle-aged Americans are dying at a rising rate, a new study shows, a startling reversal that suggests addiction and mental-health issues are setting back decades of gains in longevity.
Suicide, alcohol abuse, drug overdoses and chronic liver diseases largely drove the rise, which occurred between 1999 and 2013, according to the report published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Those causes of death offset declines in other major drivers of mortality in midlife, such as lung cancer, the study said.
The study “is going to change the game” for setting research priorities in public health, predicted Michael Eriksen, dean of Georgia State University’s School of Public Health, who wasn’t involved in the work. “Substance abuse and alcoholism are taking their toll in a way people haven’t acknowledged,” he said.
No other rich country has seen a similar reversal, and the trend is at odds with falling death rates for black and Hispanic Americans in that age group over the same period, said the authors, Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who are economics professors at Princeton University. Mr. Deaton won the Nobel Prize in economics this year.
The rise occurred primarily among men and women between 45 and 54 with no more than a high-school education. But deaths from those causes also rose for better-educated middle-aged whites as well as whites in other age groups, according to the study. Death rates are defined in the study as the number of deaths per 100,000 people for each age cohort.
The pressure is so much for some that plastic surgeons say selfies are actually boosting their business.
“I see a lot more people coming to my office and the answer to the question, ‘What bothers you, and why did you decide to come and see me?’ surprising enough is, ‘I saw a selfie of myself and I hated it, I have to fix it,’” Dr. Nicholas Nikolov said.
Nikolov is currently consulting with 23-year-old model Candice Wurster, who he said hates the shadows under her eyes in her selfies.
How is it that people are actually thinking of going under the knife to improve their selfies?
Guest Post by Jesse
Suicide is a prohibited form of violence in my own belief, as are all other forms of murder. Therefore I would not hold this type of protest up as an example to anyone.
However, an even worse offense would be to completely ignore the message which this young man delivered, as most of the mainstream media has done in the US.
I did not even know what really happened until I read this article below from Wall Street On Parade today. The police and media referred to it as a ‘social protest.’
Before he killed himself, the young man held up a sign that said “Tax the One Percent.”
Perhaps an even more pointed message might be ‘shut down the loopholes for the Top .01%.’ Those who make their money from wages and ordinary income pay fairly significant taxes.
However, the uber-rich have so many loopholes and tax avoidance schemes that they often pay much lower percentage than even those in the lowest income levels. The top .01% use the upper middle class as shields for their antics.
You may read the entire article about this here.
Rather than one young light be extinguished and quickly overlooked by the powerful, perhaps it would be better if a million people were to march on the Capitol, and effective shut it down in protest this Summer. That might get their attention. Alas, the apathy in the people is pervasive, at least for now.
Wall Street On Parade
22-Year Old Commits Suicide at Capitol to Send Congress a Message
By Pam Martens: April 14, 2015
At approximately 1:07 p.m. on Saturday afternoon, April 11, during the annual Cherry Blossom Festival celebrating springtime in the Nation’s Capitol, a 22-year old man took his own life with a gun on the Capitol grounds with a protest sign taped to his hand. According to the Washington Post, the sign read: “Tax the one percent.”
Yesterday, the Metropolitan Police Department released the young man’s name. He was Leo P. Thornton of Lincolnwood, Illinois. Based on what is currently known, the young man had traveled to Washington, D.C. for the express purpose of making a political statement with his sign and then ending his young life.
The Chicago Tribune reported that “Thornton’s parents filed a missing persons report on the morning of April 11 after he never came home from work on April 10, Lincolnwood Deputy Police Chief John Walsh said.”
Those are the tragic facts of the incident itself. But there is a broader tragedy: the vacuous handling of this story by corporate media. The Washington Post headlined the story with this: “Rhythms of Washington Return after Illinois Man’s Suicide Outside Capitol.” The message he delivered to his Congress – tax the one percent – has yet to be explored by any major news outlet in America in connection with this tragedy.
Was the message of Leo P. Thornton of Lincolnwood, Illinois a critical piece of information for this Congress to hear at this moment in American history. You’re damn right it was. Outside of Wall Street’s wealth transfer system, provisions in the U.S. tax code are the second biggest wealth transfer system to the one percent. Together, these two systems have created the greatest income and wealth inequality since the economic collapse in the Great Depression. They threaten a repeat of the 2008 financial collapse because the majority of Americans do not have the wages or savings to support the broader economy…
So fire arm violence hasn’t gone up in a decade. Homicides have been declining for a decade and are down 45% since the early 90’s. It seems people are committing suicide at a greater rate to escape this fucked up world. It appears only one segment of American society is primarily responsible for the gun violence in America – black men between the ages of 15 and 35 killing each other. The majority of this gun violence occurs in the urban ghettos of cities run by liberal Democrats and having the strictest gun laws. Why is that my problem? Why do I have to pay for their bad life choices and the welfare policies that created it?
So why does our prison population exceed every country in the world by a huge amount? (Corporate prison profits and kickbacks couldn’t be the reason. Right?) Why are police forces in primarily white suburban areas being militarized? Why do we need more cops? Why are there 80,000 SWAT raids today when crime is far lower than it was in 1990 when there were 4,000 SWAT raids? The liberal ideologues and clueless white mothers who march to stop gun violence are either too fucking stupid or have been brainwashed by the Obamanistas and the liberal MSM and refuse to see that this is nothing but a black problem in black neighborhoods in cities run by black Democratic politicians.
Let’s stop the politically correct bullshit and call a spade a spade. Reassign all the 2nd responders from the suburbs and their military equipment to North Philly, West Philly, Camden, Detroit, Chicago and all the other Democratic controlled urban kill zones and let them stop gun violence there. End the War on Drugs. Leave the white people in the suburbs alone.
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 12/19/2014 22:25 -0500
A recent report, The Annual Review of Public Health, summarizes the basic facts of firearm violence, a large and costly public health problem in the United States for which the mortality rate has remained unchanged for more than a decade. It presents findings for the present in light of recent trends. Risk for firearm violence varies substantially across demographic subsets of the population and between states in patterns that are quite different for suicide and homicide. Suicide is far more common than homicide and its rate is increasing; the homicide rate is decreasing. As with other important health problems, most cases of fatal firearm violence arise from large but low-risk subsets of the population; risk and burden of illness are not distributed symmetrically. Compared with other industrialized nations, the United States has uniquely high mortality rates from firearm violence.
SUMMARY POINTS
1. The overall fatality rate from firearm violence has not changed in more than a decade.
2. Suicide is the most common form of fatal firearm violence (64.0% of deaths in 2012) and is increasing. Homicide is decreasing.
3. Homicide risk is concentrated to a remarkable degree among Black males through much of the life span. Mortality rates from firearm violence are very high and unchanged in this group.
4. Suicide risk is highest among White males beginning in adolescence. They also account for most fatalities from firearm violence and have increasing mortality rates.
5. As compared with other industrialized nations, the United States has low rates of assaultive violence…
…but uniquely high mortality rates from firearm homicide and suicide.
Do you get the feeling things are beginning to unravel? Do you smell a whiff of panic in the air? Do you sense the ruling elite are starting to turn on each other. The psychopaths in the boardrooms wouldn’t murder to cover up their criminal misdeeds or would they? This Fourth Turning is starting to heat up.
A Rash of Deaths and a Missing Reporter – With Ties to Wall Street Investigations
By Pam Martens
February 3, 2014
In a span of four days last week, two current executives and one recently retired top ranking executive of major financial firms were found dead. Both media and police have been quick to label the deaths as likely suicides. Missing from the reports is the salient fact that all three of the financial firms the executives worked for are under investigation for potentially serious financial fraud.
The deaths began on Sunday, January 26. London police reported that William Broeksmit, a top executive at Deutsche Bank who had retired in 2013, had been found hanged in his home in the South Kensington section of London. The day after Broeksmit was pronounced dead, Eric Ben-Artzi, a former risk analyst turned whistleblower at Deutsche Bank, was scheduled to speak at Auburn University in Alabama on his allegations that Deutsche had hid $12 billion in losses during the financial crisis with the knowledge of senior executives. Two other whistleblowers have brought similar charges against Deutsche Bank.
Deutsche Bank is also under investigation by global regulators for potentially rigging the foreign exchange markets – an action similar to the charges it settled in 2013 over its traders’ involvement in the rigging of the interest rate benchmark, Libor.
Just two days after Broeksmit’s death, on Tuesday, January 28, a 39-year old American, Gabriel Magee, a Vice President at JPMorgan in London, plunged to his death from the roof of the 33-story European headquarters of JPMorgan in Canary Wharf. According to Magee’s LinkedIn profile, he was involved in “Technical architecture oversight for planning, development, and operation of systems for fixed income securities and interest rate derivatives…”
Read the entire story here.
I guess these bankers had a conscience. It’s the psychopaths like Dimon, Corzine, Blankfein, and Schwarzman that have absolutely no conscience and will never kill themselves. They will need a little help.
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/31/2014 10:16 -0500
If the stock market were already crashing then it would be simple to blame the dismally sad rash of dead bankers in the last week on that – certainly that was reflected in 1929. However, for the third time in the last week, a senior financial executive has died in what appears to be a suicide. As Bloomberg reports, following the deaths of a JPMorgan senior manager (Tuesday) and a Deutsche Bank executive (Sunday), Russell Investments’ Chief Economist (and former Fed economist) Mike Dueker was found dead at the side of a highway in Washington State. Police said the death appeared to be a suicide.
Mike Dueker, the chief economist at Russell Investments, was found dead at the side of a highway that leads to the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington state, according to the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department. He was 50.
He may have jumped over a 4-foot (1.2-meter) fence before falling down a 40- to 50-foot embankment, Pierce County Detective Ed Troyer said yesterday. He said the death appeared to be a suicide.
Dueker was reported missing on Jan. 29, and a group of friends had been searching for him along with law enforcement. Troyer said Dueker was having problems at work, without elaborating.
Dueker was in good standing at Russell, said Jennifer Tice, a company spokeswoman. She declined to comment on Troyer’s statement about Dueker’s work issues.
But as Michael Snyder noted recently, if the stock market was already crashing, it would be easy to blame the suicides on that. The world certainly remembers what happened during the crash of 1929…
Historically, bankers have been stereotyped as the most likely to commit suicide. This has a lot to do with the famous 1929 stock market crash, which resulted in 1,616 banks failing and more than 20,000 businesses going bankrupt.
The number of bankers committing suicide directly after the crash is thought to have been only around 20, with another 100 people connected to the financial industry dying at their own hand within the year.
Dueker had also been a research economist at the St. Louis Fed:
He published dozens of research papers over the past two decades, many on monetary policy, according to the St. Louis Fed’s website, which ranks him among the top 5 percent of economists by number of works published. His most-cited work was a 1997 paper titled “Strengthening the case for the yield curve as a predictor of U.S. recessions,” published by the reserve bank while he was a researcher there.
So, with stocks a mere 4% off their highs, are so many high ranking and well respected bankers committing suicide?
With family, school and work I don’t have much time to post on here like I would but, I thought this story might have slipped through the cracks of the MSM and TBPers might have missed it. When will we actually have an open honest discussion about our YOUTH, the education system, pharmacology, medicine, endemic gratuitous violence in the media and personal responsibility and accountability? Instead we sell labels as explanations and causes to much more complex and interconnected factors. We have been brainwashed by the 20-minute sitcom plot resolution and conditioned to look for the quickest and easiest response or answer to much more dire and severe influencing factors. I will not speculate as to whether or not this kid’s parents had him on any anti-depressants; but I must admit, the thought did cross my mind. Many of school shooters were taking prescription medications like anti-depressants…Like many TBPers have mentioned before, this is rarely discussed on the MSM. Hopefully Nett, pulls through and recovers! Maybe then he might find a voice and tell us what would push a 16-year old boy to that point.
Godspeed on your recovery and God Bless!
