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If roads were collapsing all across the United States, killing dozens of drivers, we would surely see that as a moment to talk about what we could do to keep roads from collapsing. If terrorists were detonating bombs in port after port, you can be sure Congress would be working to upgrade the nation’s security measures. If a plague was ripping through communities, public-health officials would be working feverishly to contain it. 

“Since 1982, there have been at least 61 mass murders carried out with firearms across the country, with the killings unfolding in 30 states from Massachusetts to Hawaii,” they found. And in most cases, the killers had obtained their weapons legally:

The fall in traffic deaths resulted from safer vehicles, restricted privileges for young drivers and seat-belt and other laws, he said. By contrast, “we’ve made policy decisions that have had the impact of making the widest array of firearms available to the widest array of people under the widest array of conditions.” While fewer households have guns, people who own guns are buying more of them, he said.

Traffic fatalities in 2011 were the lowest since 1949, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Although drivers in the U.S. logged fewer miles than in 2010, the fatality rate was the lowest on record, 1.1 deaths for each 100 million vehicle miles driven.

We had learned in church—and in graduate school—that Christians believed the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ saved the world and that this idea was the core of Christian faith.

bin Laden’s elimination will have very little effect on al Qaeda as a whole and the wider jihadist movement.

Because of bin Laden’s aforementioned communications limitations, since October 2001 when he fled Tora Bora after the U. S. invasion of Afghanistan, he has been relegated to a largely symbolic and ideological role in al Qaeda.

But the "legal gray zone" itself is alarming enough—highlighting the lack of transparency surrounding the administration's drone program—as are the discrepancies in total numbers killed. It's between 2,537 and 3,581 (including 411 to 884 civilians) killed since 2004, if you want to go with the BIJ. Or it's between 1,965 and 3,295 people since 2004 (and 261 to 305 civilians), if you want to believe the Counterterrorism Strategy Initiative at the New America Foundation. Or perhaps it's 2,651 since 2006 (including 153 civilians), according to Long War Journal. (The NAF and Long War Journal base estimates on press reports. BIJ also includes deaths reported to the US or Pakistani governments, military and intelligence officials, and other academic sources.)

“A third of the Medicare budget is now spent in the last year of life, and a third of that goes for care in the last month,” reports Susan Jacoby. In the unlikely event that everyone agreed to be euthanized 30 mere days before natural death, we would save 11 percent of the cost of Medicare—or more, counting the secondary effects of decreased demand for medical services. And considering that most of these end-of-life expenses are concentrated in relatively few patients, we wouldn’t need 100 percent uptake to make a substantial dent in costs.

But even putting aside fiscal considerations, social acceptance of these practices seems inevitable in the long run. Social norms tend to converge—albeit slowly at times—toward economic efficiency. And devoting enormous medical resources to keep people alive, often uncomfortably, for a few additional weeks is clearly inefficient.

Together, the events create the conditions for the U.S. president to expand his room to maneuver in the war in Afghanistan and ultimately reorient U.S. foreign-policy priorities.

With the death of bin Laden, a plausible, if not altogether accurate, political narrative in the United States can develop, claiming that the mission in Afghanistan has been accomplished.

From Langley, Petraeus can no longer be the authoritative military voice on the war effort in Afghanistan. Obama has retained Petraeus as a senior member of the administration while simultaneously isolating him.

I have been very surprised at how the media and other analysts have received the magazine. Some have overhyped the magazine even as others have downplayed -- even ridiculed -- its content. I have heard others say the magazine revealed nothing about al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Inspire 10 is not going to launch the grassroots jihadist apocalypse al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula seeks to foment any more successfully than the magazine's previous nine editions. The fact that a photograph of Austin, Texas, appears in the magazine does not mean that the city is somehow being secretly targeted for attack by jihadist sleeper cells.

Zey, the other live tweeter, wrote that Allison would “oust out elements in Cato that disrespect Rand and JA's philosophy.” Pearson continued: Allison “expects challenges in the area of reforming foreign policy there but seems to look forward to the challenge.”

This performance of death is a ritual farewell to the world. Even when it happens that the player is not leaving the world completely, just that character, the performance of death in deletion severs their connection to the world through that avatar allowing them to fully re-enter the world in a new character. Giving the character a final end allows the player to move on from the experiences s/he shared with that avatar and experience closure to this kind of self-relationship. For some players though, this performance of death is too strong. Rather than actually delete the character, they just set it aside as ‘retired’. Avatars and the lives we live through them (they live through us) are meaningful. Sometimes, they’re just not ready to die.

Many of these prisoners have been sent to virtually total isolation and enforced idleness for no crime, not even for alleged infractions of prison regulations. Their isolation, which can last for decades, is often not explicitly disciplinary, and therefore not subject to court oversight. Their treatment is simply a matter of administrative convenience.

The Supreme Court, over the last two decades, has whittled steadily away at the rights of inmates, surrendering to prison administrators virtually all control over what is done to those held in “administrative segregation.”

In a “60 Minutes” interview, he went so far as to call it “far more egregious” than the death penalty.

a deep-seated thirst for vengeance led the United States to invade Afghanistan in October 2001 and to declare a “global war on terrorism.”

In spite of the sense of justice and closure the killing of bin Laden brings, however, his death will likely have very little practical impact on the jihadist movement.

the phenomenon of jihadism is far wider than just the al Qaeda core leadership of bin Laden and his closest followers.

In searching for the meaning behind every gesture, diplomats start to regard every action merely as a gesture.

The threat of war is useful only when the threat is real and significant. This threat, however, was intended to be insignificant.

Of course, none of those media are dead, and neither is blogging. Instead, what's happened is that they've been succeeded by new forms that share some of their characteristics, and these new forms have peeled away all the stories that suit them best.

When all we had was the stage, every performance was a play. When we got films, a great lot of these stories moved to the screen, where they'd always belonged (they'd been squeezed onto a stage because there was no alternative). When TV came along, those stories that were better suited to the small screen were peeled away from the cinema and relocated to the telly. When YouTube came along, it liberated all those stories that wanted to be 3-8 minutes long, not a 22-minute sitcom or a 48-minute drama. And so on.

For me, the great attraction of all this is that preparing material for public consumption forces me to clarify it in my own mind. I don't really know it until I write it. Thus the more media I have at my disposal, the more ways there are for me to work out my own ideas.

In the annals of denial, it doesn't get much more extreme than the Seekers. They lost their jobs, the press mocked them, and there were efforts to keep them away from impressionable young minds. But while Martin's space cult might lie at on the far end of the spectrum of human self-delusion, there's plenty to go around. And since Festinger's day, an array of new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience has further demonstrated how our preexisting beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew our thoughts and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and logical conclusions. This tendency toward so-called "motivated reasoning [3]" helps explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal: climate change, vaccines, "death panels," the birthplace and religion of the president [4] (PDF), and much else. It would seem that expecting people to be convinced by the facts flies in the face of, you know, the facts.

But reasoning comes later, works slower—and even then, it doesn't take place in an emotional vacuum.

Any withdrawal from Afghanistan, particularly an accelerated one, will leave a power vacuum in Afghanistan that the Kabul government will not be able to fill.

There is a prior definition of success that shaped the Bush administration’s approach to Afghanistan in its early phases. The goal here was the disruption of al Qaeda’s operations in Afghanistan and the prevention of further attacks on the United States from Afghanistan.

It was more modest and, in many ways, it was achieved in 2001-2002. Its defect, of course, was that the disruption of al Qaeda in Afghanistan, while useful, did not address the evolution of al Qaeda in other countries.