Almost heaven, West Virginia

Two years ago, we brought you one of West Virginia's most famous sons, the bath-salt-abusing transvestite goat molester.

Today brings news of the pastimes of the best and brightest at West Virginia's elite private universities:

At about 1:30 a.m. on May 1, 2011, the fraternity was having a house party both Louis Helmburg III and Hughes were attending, according to a complaint filed Jan. 23, 2012, in Cabell Circuit Court.

Helmburg, who played for Marshall University’s baseball team at the time but wasn’t on the Thundering Herd’s 2013 roster, claimed Hughes became intoxicated and attempted to “shoot bottle rockets out of his anus on the ATO deck.”

When doing so, Hughes startled Helmburg, who then jumped back and fell off of the deck of the fraternity house and was injured, according to the suit. He was lodged between the deck and an air conditioning unit.

The Chinese called. They want their gold.

Remember when we advised:

With citizens in the developing world gaining wealth and sure to want their share of gold at some point, do you really want to be underweight gold the next 10, 20, 30 years?

It looks like that point is now.

Stunning images from China: Ten thousand people waiting in line to buy gold.

Yikes.

Del Mar sunrise

Baby boomers become suicide boomers

WaPo: Baby boomers are killing themselves at an alarming rate.

[...] an alarming trend among baby boomers, whose suicide rates shot up precipitously between 1999 and 2010.

It has long held true that elderly people have higher suicide rates than the overall population. But numbers released in May by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show a dramatic spike in suicides among middle-aged people, with the highest increases among men in their 50s, whose rate went up by nearly 50 percent to 30 per 100,000; and women in their early 60s, whose rate rose by nearly 60 percent (though it is still relatively low compared with men, at 7 in 100,000). The highest rates were among white and Native American and Alaskan men. In recent years, deaths by suicide has surpassed deaths by motor vehicle crashes.

As youths, boomers had higher suicide rates than earlier generations; the confluence of that with the fact that they are now beginning to grow old, when the risk traditionally goes up, has experts worried.

It's mostly a story about how the spoiled generation's self-esteem ran into the buzz saw of reality. But of course Alan Greenspan makes an appearance:

Combine high expectations with a faltering economy, and the risk goes up.

“We know that what men want to do is work — that’s a very strong ethic for them,” Arbore said. “When their jobs are being threatened, they see themselves as still needing to be in that role; they feel ashamed when they’re not able to find another job, or when their home is being foreclosed on. . . . The idea that so many of us in this country have been brought up with — that you work hard, you get your house, you get your American dream, everything is rosy — it hasn’t worked out. A lot of these boomers aren’t going to earn as much money as their parents did. They aren’t going to be as secure as their parents were. And that’s quite troubling for the boomers.”

HT: IP Freely

Are Scandis the most ironic people on earth?

HT: Capitalism

To be fair, Krugman got his Nobel before he abandoned economics to become a political hatchet man, and for a topic that had nothing to do with deficit spending. And Obama received his Nobel before he started drone striking children, for his outstanding achievement in having an awesome aura.