Good Articles That Don't Deserve Their Own Threads

That's looks like self-medicating to me. Which came first: clearly the bipolar, ATD, etc, etc.

Along with the alcohol there is mention of sleeping pills, maybe lots of coke too with reference to the substance abuse.

In my experience, bipolar's can be the life and soul of the party at least initially, but once you get to know them and the mask slips then like with other mental disorders they're not that attractive to be around and will ultimately bring the party down. Of course, there's different types of mania, but I've known a couple of bipolars over the years and they've all had a very special ability and charisma in charming people into their world until much later they are rejected when people wake-up and realise they are off the beaten track in someone else's nightmare.

I was under the impression you are born with multiple personality disorder and you don't develop or catch it. He had attention deficit but was able to function on a high level not unlike someone with borderline autism.

I just found it interesting his family kept feeding him extreme extracurricular activities that probably made it worse. Climbing mountains or yoga were distractions to what was truly bothering him. It delayed his suicide.
 

Not us out here. Its Fwiffo and his ilk who salt the shit out of everything. We think of our big Johnny Lobbs first even if the some non-Lobb-wearers might have to perish because their Neons roll into the ditches while our gigantic trucks and SUV's with big mud & snow tires plow on through:

"It’s generally too cold for road salt to be effective in the Prairies, so municipalities make do with sand, plowing and — in residential areas — simply having people drive on packed snow. But, the Prairies also regularly rack up Canada’s highest rates of highway deaths."
 
Yes - we do.

That said I think they use a sand-brine mixture and last I heard the city was using beet juice as substitutes.

If we don't do it, who would employ the people doing rust checks on vehicles?
 
How your social media betrays your mood

"Studies have found that if you have depression, your Instagram feed is more likely to feature bluer, greyer, and darker photos with fewer faces. They’ll probably receive fewer likes (but more comments). Chances are you’ll prefer the Inkwell filter which converts colour images to black and white, rather than the Valencia one which lightens them."

None of my Instragram photographs have faces. They're all blue, grey and dark. Most of them are at night.

" For an updated take, type your Twitter handle into AnalyzeWords. It’s a free text analysis tool which focuses on junk words (pronouns, articles, prepositions) to assess emotional and thinking styles."

Emotional Style
Upbeat (Low) 38
Worried (Very high) 90
Angry (Low) 34
Depressed (High) 70

Social Style
Plugged In (Average) 48
Personable (High) 77
Arrogant/Distant (Average) 51
Spacy/Valley girl (High) 68

Thinking Style
Analytic (Average) 60
Sensory (Very high) 89
In-the-moment (Average) 53
 
How your social media betrays your mood

"Studies have found that if you have depression, your Instagram feed is more likely to feature bluer, greyer, and darker photos with fewer faces. They’ll probably receive fewer likes (but more comments). Chances are you’ll prefer the Inkwell filter which converts colour images to black and white, rather than the Valencia one which lightens them."

None of my Instragram photographs have faces. They're all blue, grey and dark. Most of them are at night.

" For an updated take, type your Twitter handle into AnalyzeWords. It’s a free text analysis tool which focuses on junk words (pronouns, articles, prepositions) to assess emotional and thinking styles."

Emotional Style
Upbeat (Low) 38
Worried (Very high) 90
Angry (Low) 34
Depressed (High) 70

Social Style
Plugged In (Average) 48
Personable (High) 77
Arrogant/Distant (Average) 51
Spacy/Valley girl (High) 68

Thinking Style
Analytic (Average) 60
Sensory (Very high) 89
In-the-moment (Average) 53

I only go on Twitter as a non-participant observer to laugh at the virtue signallng and narcissism of the idiocracy and Twitterati. I wouldn't demean myself by actually getting involved in posting and such like. It's a playpen of the emotionally crippled.
 
'It Was the First Time I Cried in the Operating Room'
When pediatric surgeon Allan Goldstein entered the operating room to separate conjoined twins, he did so with the knowledge that one would have to die in order to save the other. He recalls the enormous surgical and ethical challenges.

Allan Goldstein, 50, is the surgeon-in-chief at the Hospital for Children at Massachusetts General in Boston. After he conducted an operation to separate conjoined twins, his 14-year-old daughter asked: "Did you violate the Hippocratic oath?" He had to admit he didn't know the answer to the question. The highly complex procedure to separate 22-month-old, Siamese twins, was the subject of lengthy report this fall in the New England Journal of Medicine. Goldstein also shared his peLrsonal account of the surgical and ethical challenges involved with DER SPIEGElL
It was the first time that I cried in the operation room. I had been confronted with death as we rarely experience it in pediatric surgery.

During the operation I had to execute a very difficult decision, perhaps the hardest in my career as a doctor. I was very grateful to receive ethical support while handling this case which was medically fascinating, technically challenging but also most painful for me.

It all started with an e-mail from Africa. The agent of a foundation contacted me asking whether we could help a pair of conjoined twins that he was taking care of. He also sent pictures. They showed two one-and-a-half-year-old girls who were attached just below the ribs. They had two heads, four arms, one belly, one pelvis and three legs.

They were born in a village in East Africa. I'd rather not name the country, because that might endanger the family. The people there consider abnormal babies like these twins to be a monstrosity, a sign of the devil. The parents were ostracized, stones were thrown at them and now, after the surgery, they are afraid for their lives -- I'm afraid, rightly so.

We looked closely at the pictures, wondering if we could separate these two children. It didn't appear hopeless to me. It was only later that I found out that 20 other clinics in the United States had rejected the case. It was probably better that I didn't know.

Of course, I had read about conjoined twins in the literature. But I had never before performed a separation myself. For a surgeon such an operation means an enormous and very fascinating challenge. Every case is unique, and every intervention has to be planned and prepared differently.

Apart from the photos, we had only a rudimentary CT scan and a written report. Later on, it turned out to be of particular importance that nobody had examined the two hearts more closely. I don't know what we would have done if we had known how weak one of them was. Maybe we would not have accepted the case. Without having more information, we agreed to help.

Then the family was flown to Boston. Right from the airport they sent me a text. They were so excited to be in America. Two or three days later, they came for their first visit to my office. The parents were desperate: They loved their children, but the situation was unbearable. They didn't know how to care for these twins. How should they feed or dress them? Customized strollers of this nature didn't even exist. And now imagine carrying around two joined children, with four arms and three legs.

We began with the examinations. The two girls were attached side by side. They couldn't walk, but one of them had begun to speak. She was a bit bigger, and also the livelier of the two.

'They Embraced Each Other'

They had very different personalities, even though they both were, like all conjoined twins, genetically identical: One was active and outgoing, the other more withdrawn. But they seemed to get along well: They played together and embraced each other.

We had to find out in as much detail as possible how they were attached. They clearly had two hearts, two lungs and two stomachs. But where did their guts join? How was the common pelvis organized? Which parts were supplied by the nerves and arteries of which body?

During separation it is important to follow the bloodstream. We learned that we would have to give the third, though malformed leg to the bigger, stronger one of the two girls, because it was her body that supplied it with blood.

In the echocardiogram and the cardiac CT scan, we discovered that the smaller, weaker of the two girls suffered from congenital heart disease. The oxygen content of her blood was rather low. Also, her complexion wasn't healthy. They were both black, of course, but one had a pink, robust color, while her sister looked more ashen.

Then she became ill, an infection of the respiratory tract. Usually this would not have been very severe, but her body could not tolerate it, because her lungs had very poor blood supply. The twins had to be moved to the intensive care unit. The oxygen content in her blood sank to a life-threateningly low level and she turned bluish. At this point, we realized that she was going to die. Her heart was just too weak to take care of her body alone. She was hanging on her sister's drip.

Life-Threatening Danger

But what did that mean for the upcoming operation? For one girl, her seriously ill sister posed a life-threatening danger. If she died, the other would live only a few more hours. For the other, however, the healthy sister was a life support. The 3-D model we made of the skeleton and the blood vessels of the twins clearly shows the artery running from one body to the other right across the lower chest, supplying it with oxygen-rich blood. We knew that if we separated them, we would have to cut that lifeline.

We sought advice from the pediatric ethics committee of our hospital. In many extensive conversations, I learned how important it is how to frame such a situation: Our intent was not to end the life of one girl, but rather to save the other's. The difference is subtle, because the result would be the same: We would push two living children into the operating room and leave it with only one.

Not all of us followed the argument. Three doctors -- two surgeons and one anesthesiologist -- stepped back. They said they could not participate in such a thing. The idea that our intervention would likely lead to the death of the weaker girl seemed unfathomable to them. We respected this decision.

We also discussed the case at length with the parents. We had to be sure that they wanted the separation, even if it meant the death of one of their daughters. And we wondered how the girl herself would have decided: If she had to die herself, would she have wanted her sister to live? Or would she have preferred that they die together? Although I will never know the answer, it comforts me to believe that I acted in her interest.

For the operation we put together a team of around 50 surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses and technicians. When we started the skin incision we knew that the chances of survival for the weaker twin sister were very low. But we were not without hope: Maybe we would be able to keep the girl stable for at least a few hours after separation, so that the parents could say goodbye to her.

Dramatic Moments

The operation proceeded just as we had planned it. We had separated the twins' fused liver, we had divided the small intestine, and we had split the complexly organized pelvis. In the case of the skin it was difficult to determine exactly which parts belonged to which child. We injected fluorescent dye into the vessels of the stronger girl. Then we switched off the light and marked the glowing area. The parts that glowed stayed with the stronger girl.

Finally, more than 13 hours had passed, and the children were almost entirely separated, except for some tissue and skin at their backside. And the condition of both was still amazingly good. Peoples' hope was increasing: Wow, we thought, they might both survive!

However, we had left the transection of the crucial artery to the end, because we did not want to unnecessarily risk an early death of the weaker sister. But now, at this point, the cut had to be made. First, we squeezed the vessel as a test. The blood pressure in the smaller girl's body dropped immediately. The effect was dramatic.

I don't remember who made the crucial cut, but it was me who tied it down. Actually, she died very abruptly. The anesthesiologist tried to stabilize her condition with fluids and medication. But very soon he had to give up.

It took another 15 or 20 minutes for the plastic surgeons to cut the back muscles. Then we pushed the dead body into a neighboring operation room. There, we closed the body and wrapped her in a way that the parents could only see the face, which looked fine.

A team came to bring the girl up to her parents. I, for myself, sought refuge in a third operation room, and I cried there.

The surviving girl is doing great. She's happy. She has one major problem: One of her legs is a so-called "duplicated leg." The foot ends in a big toe, with three little toes on each side of it. This leg has also two tibias and no knee joint. She will never be able to use it.

After the operation, we recommended amputation. We told the parents that children at such early age learn to use a prosthesis almost as well as their own limb. But for the parents, there was no question: "That is the last thing we're going to do," they said. Once again, I realized that this case is challenging not only for surgical and ethical reasons but also because of the complicated cultural component.

We see her regularly for follow-up examinations. Once, when she visited us about three months after the operation, I gave her a stuffed animal. She smiled and said something to her father. He translated it for me: "She says: 'This is my sister.'"

Somewhere deep inside, she seems to remember that once there was a twin sister with her.

Source: www.spiegel.de
 
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/wor...s-to-face-uphill-struggle-in-supporting-mali/

This online article is different than what I read in the paper so I give you the real version:

"Canada has also sent hundreds of soldiers to Mali since 2010 in a multimillion-dollar effort to help train the Malian army in counterterrorism, border security and other priorities. Much of this training was led by the U.S. military under a US$500-million counterterrorism program. But one of the graduates of the U.S. training program, Captain Amadou Sanogo, shocked the Pentagon in 2012 by leading a military coup in Mali. The coup, in turn, triggered a rebel offensive and the insurgents captured all of northern Mali. Only a French intervention in 2013 saved Mali from the rebels.

The coup forced Canada to suspend its aid to Mali for nearly two years. One senior U.S. commander later acknowledged that the U.S.-led training had forgotten the importance of instilling democratic values in Mali’s soldiers."

Let me get this straight, the US trained these soldiers who led a coup and became the rebels. The country was in shambles until France saved it. Now the Canadians are going in to do peacekeeping. Why are we saving these sh@thole countries outside of the 1B of Canadian mining interests?
 
Saudi Crown Prince Thinks He Can Transform the Middle East. Should We Believe Him?

"A great deal has turned on the actions of men in red checkered headscarves and flowing robes. So there could hardly be a more disarming question than the one bin Salman poses in the hotel suite where he has just sat for a formal portrait, once the cameras are finally gone: 'Can I take this stuff off?'.....He wore a blazer and a shirt open at the collar. It was full regalia at MIT, but a business suit in Seattle for Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates."

I've only ever seen him in traditional dress. If my hair loss ever gets to his point I can adopt a Saudi head dress, but good on him.

"The heart of the pitch the crown prince has taken on the road is forward-looking, universal and delivered in the confident, fact-stippled surge of words that might describe a startup. Bin Salman in large part is looking for money, foreign funds being a crucial element of Vision 2030, his plan that promises to reconcile feudal society with the world around it. As hard as it once would have been to imagine, collapsing oil prices, and the economic and social demands of an exploding youth population, require economic reform. And for all his power and wealth, bin Salman needs outside help to do it."

Good luck raising money for your $2T sovereign fund.

"Seven in 10 Saudis are even younger than him. And when they look up from their phones, they are less impressed."

Angry young people, rampant extremism which he says makes Saudis victims, and a state government running on petrol that might collapse one day and ruin 3 of 4 Saudis' welfare. Recipe for disaster.
 
What's the point of pointless jobs

With an interesting quotation from Dostoevsky:

“'It once occurred to me that if one desired to reduce a man to nothing – crush him in such a manner that the most hardened murderer would tremble, all one would have to do would be to give him work of a completely useless character… Let him be constrained to pour water from one vessel into another, to pound sand, to move a heap of earth from one place to another, and then immediately move it back again, then I am persuaded that at the end of a few days, the prisoner would hang himself or commit a thousand capital crimes, preferring rather to die than endure such humiliation, shame, and torture.'

But what is this, really, except a description of as much as half the paid work currently being done in the world.

And we wonder why we’re all depressed."
 
Japan floods: 155 killed after torrential rain and landslides

I'm surprised the news media is infatuated with the dozen of Thai kids but is ignoring Japan's 155 dead from floods and rain. You would imagine a developed country wouldn't suffer deaths in the hundreds from a natural disaster.

The media owns everyone's perception of reality and they can easily milk what the eugenicists knew:

"death one person tragedy, death millions statistic"
 
No alcohol safe to drink, global study confirms

"A large new global study published in the Lancet has confirmed previous research which has shown that there is no safe level of alcohol consumption. The researchers admit moderate drinking may protect against heart disease but found that the risk of cancer and other diseases outweighs these protections."

"Yet Prof David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge, sounded a note of caution about the findings. 'Given the pleasure presumably associated with moderate drinking, claiming there is no 'safe' level does not seem an argument for abstention,' he said. 'There is no safe level of driving, but the government does not recommend that people avoid driving.' 'Come to think of it, there is no safe level of living, but nobody would recommend abstention.'"
 
How do you know this?

I live in Toronto. Saw this one on blogto. Little bit surprised (but hey it's Toronto) that it wasn't the first place.

80hh ? Back pages. Women that cheap are ugly but can be tempted into extras. They're desperate at that rate.
 
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Why London's subway system leaves so many disabled people without a ride

"He said there are only 50 stations in London, out of a total of 270, that he is able to use. 'That means there's whole neighbourhoods of London that I just cannot get around.' He explained that his daily commute involves using several elevators to travel throughout tube stations. He also regularly has to ask other passengers to help him tilt his wheelchair back so he can get on and off the train. "

If only those Victorians cared enough to build accessible tube stations for the crippled back in the 19th century...
 
sheez, now when the famous brothel connaisseur friend customer isn't around anymore ..., tststs

probably pimp can help out ...

I live in Toronto. Saw this one on blogto. Little bit surprised (but hey it's Toronto) that it wasn't the first place.

80hh ? Back pages. Women that cheap are ugly but can be tempted into extras. They're desperate at that rate.
 
If only those Victorians cared enough to build accessible tube stations for the crippled back in the 19th century...

They didn't, but thankfully we are generally better-informed now, and realise that simply because you may be confined to a wheelchair, it doesn't mean that you have fewer rights than someone who can walk.

The main obstacle in these sort of situations is money, as it can cost a lot to retro-fit train stations. Also, governments and councils nowadays seem obsessed with building things that look impressive, rather than simply building something utilitarian that does the job. This no doubt contributes considerably to the huge cost of building/upgrading infrastructure in first-world countries.
 

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