‘Over many months, The New York Times did what the United States government has not — examine the long-term mental harm of torture and coercive methods used in C.I.A. prisons and Guantánamo Bay. Many of the men subjected to such treatment have emerged with the same psychological symptoms as tortured American P.O.W.s…’

Source: The New York Times, via abby

You’ve probably never tasted Bitrex, but it’s all over your home.

Source: Atlas Obscura

5 compelling reasons to stop calling Trump’s comments “locker room talk”: Donald Trump and his surrogates have been trying to dismiss the leaked tape that turned his campaign upside-down as being just “locker room talk.” He did so in a written statement immediately following the tape’s release, and during Sunday night’s presidential debate when he repeatedly dodged Anderson Cooper’s direct questions about what he said on the tape.But let’s be clear: The footage features Donald Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women.

The Daily Show dismantles Trump’s nonsense excuse about “locker room talk”: “If you conduct ‘locker room talk’ everywhere, it’s not the locker room,” Trevor Noah said. “It’s you.”

Dear Donald Trump: I played in the NFL. Here’s what we really talk about in the locker room. You’re wrong, and only the type of wrong an over-tanned ham hock like yourself can accomplish, plummeting past the morass of gross incivility into the abyss of depraved sociopathy. — Chris Kluwe.

Why Donald Trump’s furious tweetstorm at Paul Ryan is so revealing: He’s trailing Hillary Clinton by double digits in some polls, but Donald Trump has now adopted a promising strategy that could rejuvenate his flailing campaign.Haha, just kidding! Trump has decided to declare war on his own party via Twitter, attacking Paul Ryan and turning the GOP into a circular firing squad just four weeks from Election Day.

Watch Samantha Bee take down Donald Trump with the “vagina monologue” he deserves: “In fact, ‘Take a Tic Tac and grab them by the pussy’ is the closest thing to a plan Trump has described this election,” Bee said.

Trump: Warren Buffett avoids taxes like me. Buffett: Nope, and here’s my taxes to prove it.  As a final knife twist, Buffett notes that he is currently being audited — but is releasing information from his return anyway, since that is totally allowed, despite Trump’s protests to the contrary.

Donald Trump’s threat to imprison Hillary Clinton is a threat to democracy: There is no way to sugarcoat this: At Sunday night’s presidential debate, Donald Trump threatened to throw Hillary Clinton in jail if he wins the presidency. This — threatening to jail one’s political opponents — is how democratic norms die.

‘LSD and mushrooms in one-tenth doses are becoming more popular among you professionals, especially in the tech industry. Since 2010, on the advice of LSD’s [discoverer] Albert Hofmann, Dr. James Fadiman has been encouraging dozen of contacts to keep journals of their experiences microdosing, usually a couple of times a week…’

Source: Boing Boing

‘Plenty of columnists have already highlighted how nauseating the GOP’s moral calculus has been. Donald Trump was tolerable when he depicted Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers. He was fine when he proposed shredding the First Amendment to restrict Muslims from entering the country. He was fine insulting POWs and the parents of a soldier killed in action. He was fine when he mocked the disabled and when he framed womanhood as its own disability. He was fine with his history of racist housing discrimination, and he was even fine early Friday afternoon, when he reasserted the guilt of the Central Park 5 – all minorities, all exonerated by DNA evidence.

But later that afternoon, it turned out that he went after white women – apparently literally, with his hands. He went after people who vote for Republicans in numbers. Suddenly, after 17 months, there were real victims involved. The imminent GOP crack-up seemed like all it needed was someone to give it a big push…’

Source: Rolling Stone

As Paul Krugman puts it, ‘Is there a partisan pattern here?’ Although Republicans are trying to distance themselves from Trump after his boasts about sexual assault, no one should be fooled that the GOP has any enduring concern about the matter. Trump is not an anomaly here; he is rather a pure distillation of his party’s predatory values.

Source: The New York Times