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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Suicide Kills More Americans Than Gun Violence

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Ted Rall
As I waited for the body of a man who jumped in front of my train to be cleared from the tracks — less than a week before another train I was riding struck a suicide victim — it occurred to me that (a) I should check whether suicide rates are increasing due to the bad economy (they are, especially among men in their 50s), and that (b) talking about suicide is long overdue. With modernity comes depression; depression sometimes leads to suicide. And it’s a global phenomenon. “The World Health Organization reports that suicide rates have increased 60 percent over the past 50 years, most strikingly in the developing world, and that by 2020 depression will be the second most prevalent medical condition in the world,” T.M. Luhrmann wrote in The New York Times recently. Why are so many people opting out? Can we eliminate or reduce the number of our brothers and sisters who kill themselves? Disclosure: my…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Unpersonning of Generation X

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Ted Rall
I’ve been disappeared. Erased from history. Dropped down the memory hole. (bye) If you were born between 1961 and 1976, you no longer exist. Generation X has been disappeared. The Soviets altered photos to excise the images of leaders who had fallen out of favor, but communist censors went after individuals. America’s corporate media is more ambitious. They’re turning 50 million people into unpersons. The disappearing of Gen X began about a year ago, when major news outlets began reducing living Americans to two generations: the Baby Boomers (born 1946-1960) and their children, the Millennials (born approximately 1977-2004). (Generational birth years are controversial. Many classify the Boom years between 1946 and 1964, but I agree with the demographers William Strauss and Neil Howe’s assessment — and the novelist Douglas Coupland, who defined the term “Generation X” — that people like me, born from ’61 to ’64, called “the most dysfunctional cohort of the century,” identify with the culture and economic…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: No College, No Job. College is Expensive. Is It Any Wonder Students Turn to Porn?

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Ted Rall
Everybody’s talking about — scratch that. Culture is too atomized for everybody to be talking about anything. Lots of people who don’t usually cop to knowing about, much less watching, porn — writers at high-end intellectual magazines, columnists for The Washington Post — are talking about Belle Knox, the Duke University freshman who embraced her outing as an adult film actress in an eloquent, feminist theory-imbued attack against slut-shaming. Social media has responded as you’d expect: lots of mean slut-shaming that proves Knox’s point that “We deem to keep women in a place where they are subjected to male sexuality. We seek to rob them of their choice and of their autonomy. We want to oppress them and keep them dependent on the patriarchy.” Tabloids and gossip sites are reveling in their usual witches’ brew of judginess and salacious intrigue. Big corporate media is reacting like George C. Scott finding out his daughter is a whore. Considering that the average…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Four Horsemen of the American Apocalypse

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Ted Rall
  What the Media Can’t/Won’t Tell You About Why Russia Invaded Ukraine As usual, America’s foreign correspondents are falling down on the job. Stories devoid of historical context cast Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a naked act of neo-Soviet aggression. Considering that the relevant history begins a mere two decades ago, its omission is inexcusable. The spark that led to the takeover of Crimea was not the overthrow of President Viktor Yanukovich. It is what happened the day after. A 2012 law gave the Russian language official status in regions where Russians comprise more than 10% of the population. This is the case in most of eastern Ukraine and particularly in Crimea, where 59% are ethnic Russians. One week ago, Ukraine’s rump parliament (members of Yanukovich’s party, hiding from opposition forces and in fear for their lives, didn’t show up) took advantage of Yanukovich’s downfall to overturn the language law. Americans didn’t notice, but Russians did.             “Attack on the…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Ukraine Is Not a Revolution.

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Ted Rall
Mainstream news outlets in the United States, whose politics are closely aligned with those of the U.S. government, frequently criticize mainstream media outlets in Russia, whose politics are closely aligned to those of the Russian government. Current example: recent events in Ukraine. “Russian officials have been doing everything they can to make it clear that they don’t recognize the legitimacy of this current parliament or its right to form an interim government,” NPR’s Corey Flintoff reported February 26th. “The impression that ordinary Russians would get from [their] news coverage is really that the Ukrainian Revolution is very much a thing to be feared.” Flintoff made fun of Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who called the overthrow of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych “essentially the result of an armed mutiny.” Russian Interior Minister Sergey Lavrov said it was “an attempt at a coup d’état and to seize power by force.” Yet American media insist on the R-word: revolution. Here we go again.…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Good Reasons to Hate Big Tech

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Ted Rall
We love computers and other electronics, but — not unlike an addict’s opinion of his dealer — we hate the companies that sell them to us. Now our contempt for Silicon Valley is expanding to include tech workers. In San Francisco, where locals know the techies best, 30-year-old worker bees are taking as much heat as their billionaire CEO overlords. Geographical familiarity breeds political contempt. Just as Zuccotti Park gave birth to Occupy Wall Street’s clarion cry against the predator class henceforth to be known as the Banksters, San Francisco bus stops have become ground zero in a backlash against Big Tech. Oversized SUV-like buses that ferry Google staffers down the Peninsula provoke anger by clogging public transit stops in a city whose crumbling fleet of city vehicles is starved of funding. Private tech company buses have been blocked by protesters who object to gentrification fueled by the soaring rents paid by deep-pocked tech workers. A bus window got smashed.…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Psst. The Pulitzers are BS.

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Ted Rall
  The winners of this year’s Pulitzer Prizes in journalism will be announced in a couple of months. I will not be one of them; I forgot to enter this year. You read that correctly. Anyone can enter. All you need is fifty bucks, some clips and a dream. And good credit (no checks accepted). Remember that the next time you hear someone touted as a “Pulitzer Prize nominee.” I’ve won awards. I’ve judged them. I’ve heard behind-the-scenes stories of how the winners are chosen. I’ve concluded that the gap between public perception — that these prizes are meaningful, that they reward the year’s best work — and sordid reality — the selection process makes no sense and is corrupt to boot — is huge. If people knew the truth, they’d be shocked. So here’s the truth. Judges brazenly allow their political biases and personal connections (or grudges) guide their supposed-to-be objective decision-making. Their taste runs boringly middlebrow. No shock…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: “90 Days” of BS, “90 Days” to Sell Out

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Ted Rall
IN WHICH I CALL OUT HIPSTERS AND CELEBRITIES FOR THE RIDICULOUS ARGUMENTS THEY GAVE FOR VOTING FOR OBAMA Politicians get called to account for their broken promises. So too should their celebrity supporters. When boldface names convince the hoi polloi to punch the chads that put their favorite candidates into positions of power, they must assume responsibility when their pitches and talking points turn out to be low-grade bullshit. One of the most notable pairings of electoral politics and celebrity of the 2012 presidential campaign was the website/happening “90 Days, 90 Reasons.” Each day during the last three months running up to Election Day, one liberal Democratic actor, writer or musician recruited by Dave Eggers’ McSweeney’s literary empire supplied an essay urging us to reelect Obama along with a reason to do so. Disclosure: Eggers and I were friends during the 1990s, when I was a contributing editor to his Might magazine. From New York Times esoterica compiler/”Bored to Death”…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: Nick Lowe Ruined My Summer. Then He Changed My Life.

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Ted Rall
Overplaying is a crime. It is as tragic and as wrong as the contempt that lovers sometimes allow to transform their partner from an object of passion into a monster whom they behold only with scorn. As a tween I couldn’t get enough of the Beatles; now I can’t run fast enough from any speaker spewing their music. What changed? Not Ringo plus those three other lads — if anything, they sound cleaner and crackle-pop-free and remastered through the sound equipment I can afford as a middle-aged adult. Objectively, they’re still a great band. It’s all me. Mostly to blame are countless DJs and their corporate masters at the hundreds of radio stations I’ve heard play the Beatles thousands of times. Add the breathless hype with which every unearthing of an alternative version of a lost demo is greeted — there was a reason those versions weren’t originally released. As with chocolate and water and everything except sex, repetition begins…
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SYNDICATED COLUMN: End the Death Penalty. Allow Vigilantism.

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Ted Rall
To the State of Ohio, Dennis McGuire was a human guinea pig — the first inmate executed using an experimental mix of poisons cobbled together because the manufacturers of pharmaceuticals used in older, proven cocktails refuse to continue supplying them for anti-medical purposes. For 25 agonizing minutes, McGuire thrashed against his restraints, choked and gasped for air before finally succumbing to death. “He started making all these horrible, horrible noises, and at that point, that’s when I covered my eyes and my ears,” said his daughter Amber McGuire, who witnessed the state killing at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, near Lucasville. Unsurprisingly, the family of the woman McGuire raped and murdered was unmoved by McGuire’s suffering. “As I recall the events preceding her death, forcing her from the car, attempting to rape her vaginally, sodomizing her, choking her, stabbing her, I know she suffered terror and pain. He is being treated far more humanely than he treated her,” said a…
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