Sometimes I swear to freaking gawd Republicans are planet sized douches. Who do they blame for the Russians shooting down a civilian airliner? You guessed it. Not Vlad the Impaler but our own president. Vlad, as you remember, is their fly loverboy, a man's man, a world leader! Never mind he's also a murderer. Blame Obama! Fucking douches.

NATO member countries should consult with each other and then invoke Article 4.

Not just a leading AIDS researcher. Up to a hundred leading AIDS researcher, traveling to an AIDS conference in Australia.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/aids-e…

Er, Article 5.

@3 beat me to it. A hundred of the smartest people on the planet, killed senselessly by bullet-headed Neanderthal thugs, led by a Russian officer who laughed as he watched the plane go down, saying "that was a blast!"

http://www.news.com.au/world/prorussian-…

That Cord Jefferson article was ridiculous. The behavior he described post-breakup happens on both sides - it's called "cray cray". Men & women are both guilty of this, so...

As long as society, both men and women, reward aggression in men, men will continue to be aggressive. Aggressive guys are more successful in business and their social lives.

You really can not expect people who have been told their whole lives that if they are not aggressive competitors that they are abject failures to just stop being aggressive, espcially when aggression is so clearly rewarded.

I hate how widespread social problems are always something the "other group" is expected to solve on their own.

The Man Who Brought Down Martha Stewart

Rest easy, Amerika, the individual responsible for bringing down that notorious super-criminal of a few years back, Martha Stewart, is the top cop in the nation, the FBI director, James Comey.

Comey has an illustrious background: graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, clerked for Bush family member, John Walker, Jr., and would later be employed with the law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher (the firm involved with Iran/Contra, Bush v. Gore, Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, plus litigated in favor of American multinationals in Columbia in their hiring of assassins to murder union organizers there, the firm presently represents Chris Christie in Bridgegate), and during his stint with the Bush administration Comey supported torture, of course.

Later he was chief counsel at Lockheed Martin, then would move on to work for the largest hedge fund in existence, while serving on the board of directors at both HSBC Holdings, that major drug money launderer, and far worse than that, the board of the National Chamber Litigation Center, the legal arm of the US Chamber of Commerce, and a hotbed of chronic litigation.

If this is our top cop, exactly who is policing him?

@8, a most intelligent comment and I thank you, because the obvious can never be stated enough, in this Land of the Ultimate Dumbed Down!

@7, you, on the other hand, sound like a complete and total idiot! Why would anyone concoct such nonsense!

And I have seen plenty of successful women -- e.g. Sawant and Holcomb -- who are just shrinking violets. NOT.

ALL successful people are aggressive.

It's not reality-based to suggest that aggressiveness is just a male trait.

@11, the article/talk centers around sex-related aggressive behavior, that is, aggressive behavior not centered on altruistic goals and purposes.

In conjunction with @8's remark, read the article below and see if you can comprehend the connection to the Guardian commentary.

http://www.vice.com/read/feminism-and-co…

@2&4 - you really think - as horrible as this is - that starting WW-III is a good response? I mean...this is a horrific event...no doubt. And not just because 100 top researchers were onboard - all the human lives have equal value. However, it's much more likely this was the result of Putin allowing untrained (at least on these systems) 'separatists' to have some of Russia's best toys. And the idiots targeted the wrong aircraft.

This starts to get frighteningly close to the start of WWI: stumbling into horrible outcomes of comparitively smaller tragedies. Right now the death toll is 300...if Russia and NATO start fighting...how long do you really think it's gonna take for that to increase a couple orders of magnitude.

Please tell me this is the result of some reflexive hatred of Moscow which one might assume from someone with a Polish association, as your handle seems to suggest, rather than a reasoned response.

@6 & @8 - yes, exactly. That was the silliest bit of collective guilt hand-wringing I've seen in a while. Eliot Rodgers was a mentally ill person; you cannot extrapolate from him to an entire class (all men). And, for the record, dumping someone by way of a two minute phone call after a several year relationship during which marriage was seriously discussed is cowardly and selfish a-holery. No, it's not license to harrass and stalk your ex, but it's not defensible or justifiable. Thank $dog I don't have to date any longer; I did make a point of telling people in person, even after only a few months, that I wasn't interested...as a sign of, you know, respect for them as human beings with feelings.

@8 thank you. Most women I know are constantly rewarding aggressive behavior, and are quite turned off by the passive man. I think faults in one gender are almost entirely the responsibility of the other gender, since 99% of the time our actions are dictated by the opposite sex consciously or subconsciously.

The issue gets a little complicated in LGBT individuals of course, but I think male/female archetypes are still pretty well adhered to for the most part even there.

@12
Please give me the executive summary.
Where have I erred?
Please enlighten me.

(I couldn't get through the Vice article -- too many words.)

@13 Yep, a whole lot of people, who are supposed to know better, are starting to sound like John McCain, which cannot be good news.

I've been standing here, waiting, ready to work with other men to curb their aggression. where are they? if they don't show up soon, i'm going to get really angry. like start-hitting-people angry.

And another interesting article on Aaron Swartz and the crimes against us:

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/silicon…

Swartz’s impact on the digital realm is substantial; Creative Commons, RSS, Reddit, and Demand Progress are all Swartz creations. Besides changing how we share, consume, and act upon information on the web, Swartz is credited with stopping SOPA, a bill that if passed threatened to destroy the internet as we know it. After his suicide, Swartz’s parents blamed the US government, who charged their son with CFAA violations that amounted to 35 years of jail time. His felony-worthy crime? Downloading too many academic articles in an act of civil disobedience. Swartz’s death galvanized CFAA reform in his name, with a proposed amendment called “Aaron’s Law.” It was one bright spot in an otherwise bleak time.

And another excellent article for today concerning the wisdom of SCOTUS:

http://io9.com/hilariously-useless-comme…

@9: As much as I love Martha, the poor dear really brought herself down. She was repeatedly advised to confess to an insider trading violation and pay a fine, but no - just like Nixon she tried to cover it up. Nevertheless, an appellate judge should have overruled the sentence and pardoned her based on her contributions to society.

@3 almost included one of our Traumatic Brain Injury scientists who took a later flight

@22, that would indeed have been a loss, because we're all waiting for his report on what has happened to you.

The Russian rebels (I'm just going to start calling them "Cossacks") have started to shoot to drive away the European investigators. The bodies are starting to bloat and stink while these armed meatheads wander around fingering their belongings. And Russia keeps doubling down on "we are pure of heart, the Ukrainians did it", which is ludicrously untrue. It is an ugly, ugly, scene.

@13 - I'm not saying we have to go to war, just saying that this shit is crap and they need to have better manners while not-so-subtly annexing pieces of other nations. Or is that still too aggressive for you?

And it's lol you think I'm polish, but I'm honored you think that I come with their pre-conceived hatreds or whatever.

@22 - double ugh.

@27 - this shit is crap, yes. Also, I keep reading Wassea as Walesa. My dyslexic bad.

@27, so you're not from the Bialystock Wesseas, then?

Germany's attitude seems to be "sucks that y'all got murdered and shit but we really need that gas." Australia's ready to go straight to war in ten minutes. France is maybe thinking about maybe stopping, no, maybe slowing, no, maybe talking about slowing, if you promise, arms sales to Russia.

I think NATO is going to prove useless, the rebels intransigent, Putin oblivious, and those bodies are still going to be in that field a week from now.

Any update on that assault in a Seattle cab?

@32 any update on your plan to sterilize all women?

Max Seddon tweets from the scene:

OSCE unable to access all but a small area of #MH17 crash site due to aggressive armed rebel guards. "Some looked slightly intoxicated."

This is beyond indecent.

@34: indeed. Numerous photos of fucking meatheads in balaclavas with guns slung across their shoulders, cigarette in one hand and pawing through wreckage with their other.

Fucking NATO needs to land about a dozen planes filled with troops and vehicles and secure that area right now. It's bad enough we'll probably never see the black boxes, but having the bodies and parts thereof rot away and personal remains looted is disgusting.

@fnarf: BAD BAD BAD. The Cossacks are the ones persecuted in Crimea. They are the ones who refused to vote because they didn't want to be part of Russia.

@Hanoumatoi: the separatists refer to themselves as Cossacks in the audiotapes released by Ukrainian officials.

@8 @10 In the article, a person broke up with their loving partner of three years, having discussed marriage and children in a two minute phone call...

That doesn't give anyone pause? Is going crazy over your heart ripped out so casually, male privilege? After making promises about the future, and gaining someone's trust, you owe them nothing? It's a privilege for them to try to change someone's mind?

But a man broke up with me once after we'd planned to move to another city together. There is just as much entitlement, privilege, and removal of agency in claiming the right to break all your promises, take back all your commitments, and then claim the right to never hear that person again, casually, and over the phone.