You don’t think this is the decline and fall? It just stuck me suddenly as I scanned the five top articles in the New York Times this morning:

1. Two prisoners who died in U.S. custody in Afghanistan were beaten by soldiers in sustained assaults that caused their deaths.
2. A man on trial for rape shot and killed the judge in his case, a court stenographer and a sheriff’s deputy in a courthouse rampage.
3. Blood Ties: 2 Officers’ Long Path to Mob Murder Indictments
4. Insurers, working with the F.B.I., said they have broken up an elaborate scam in which doctors filed more than $1 billion of fraudulent insurance claims.
5. Drinking Game Can Be a Deadly Rite of Passage: The “power hour” tradition involves 21-year-olds going to a bar at midnight on their birthdays and trying to down 21 shots in the hour or so before the bar closes.