spent three pages rationalizing a constructed dilemma that should not have become a dilemma. The journalist’s job is to report truth: in this case that a young woman, tragically killed, had been abused, coerced, and trauma-bonded to a religious cult that then attempted to exploit her death to promote its agenda. That’s important to know and report, and need not elicit guilt. Salon and Mr. Cullen should be proud of that work.

Publication of Mr. Cullen’s book reminds us that this wound is still open. We send in police, sheriff, and FBI “investigators” to attempt to understand the psychosocial stressors driving emotional and mental distress in adolescents, the effects of “social ostracism” and rage. Please. Why not have the local school board or city council look into it?

The adolescence/early adulthood transition is one of the most profound and vulnerable of developmental challenges, the one that can generate schizophrenia. Up to it, survival itself and sense of safety depend on healthy systems that promote differentiation and development of self (and not by coercing behavior). Especially without that support, the prospect of facing a dog-eat-dog adult world, in a place like Littleton, Colorado, disconnected, desperate for peer relatedness, for a “girlfriend”, ostracized, not valued, at the bottom of constructed hierarchies, not fitting in, rejected, those social realities seeming arbitrary, unresponsive, not making sense, - all that can conspire to be experienced as existential threat. Perceived threat to existence is where the undifferentiated rage comes from, in this case combined with loss of hope. Labels like “psychopath” or “depressive” (even if they were legitimate clinical terms) don’t help to understand the psychosocial forces driving the fear and loss that can drive rage in this developmental transition. Understanding those forces and social failures would require looking into places we don’t want to.

you may hold some distorted beliefs about what therapy should and can be. If your actual experiences align with what you have written here, don’t go back. Try someone else.

that some of the aspersions cast here regarding President’s motivations and genuineness may detract from serious discourse on efforts to help our Nation’s money users get out of these dire straits they find themselves in. I think one way we can all help is simply by staying focused on how darned smart and committed to our well being our New Leaders are:

“Taleban: we will launch attack on America that will amaze world”

(link at sig)

Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taleban, threatened yesterday to launch an attack on Washington that would “amaze everyone in the world” as he claimed responsibility for the raid on a police academy in Lahore and boasted of a new regional militant alliance.

Mr Mehsud, for whom the United States offered a $5 million reward last week, said that Monday's raid, which killed seven police officers, was retaliation for US drone attacks on Pakistan's northern tribal areas, now the main hub of Taleban and al-Qaeda activity.

So you see? What more confirmation do we need of President’s prescience and the intelligence of his plans to root out and kill all of these latent enemies? Obviously, we must work faster to eliminate them quickly.

So, regarding any worries about righting The Economy, it may be well to remember, as oft noted here on Salon, that our Leaders are not dumb, after all.

(BTW, I found Mr. Greenwald’s restrained and cogent rejoinder to the concerns of twilight14 to be unusually effective.)