Why are Americans dying younger?

The following article confirms the overall decline and speculates that it is because of increased use of illicit drugs and more dangerous illicit drugs (such as fentanyl). I too would see that as the most probable cause. Note however that the overall decline was tiny -- .19 of a year or 69 days, which  could well not survive replication and is in any case of little practical importance.

It is however interesting that people with a college degree defied the trend and lived longer. My interpretation of that would be that the college people were smarter and hence more judicious in their use of drugs, so that drugs had little impact on their health.  They therefore experienced the normal growth in lifespan that is characteristic of recent decades. The dummies by contrast had a higher proportion of heavy drug users among them who largely killed themselves one way or another by their high drug use


Association Between Educational Attainment and Causes of Death Among White and Black US Adults, 2010-2017

By Isaac Sasson et al

Abstract

Importance:  There are substantial and increasing educational differences in US adult life expectancy. To reduce social inequalities in mortality, it is important to understand how specific causes of death have contributed to increasing educational differences in adult life expectancy in recent years.

Objective:  To estimate the relationship of specific causes of death with increasing educational differences in adult life expectancy from 2010 to 2017.

Design, Setting, and Participants:  Serial cross-sectional study of 4 690 729 deaths recorded in the US National Vital Statistics System in 2010 and 2017.

Exposures:  Sex, race/ethnicity, and educational attainment.

Main Outcomes and Measures:  Life expectancy at age 25 years and years of life lost between ages 25 and 84 years by cause of death.

Results:  The analysis included a total of 2 211 633 deaths in 2010 and 2 479 096 deaths in 2017. Between 2010 and 2017, life expectancy at age 25 significantly declined among white and black non-Hispanic US residents from an expected age at death of 79.34 to 79.15 years (difference, −0.18 [95% CI, −0.23 to −0.14]).

Greater decreases were observed among persons with a high school degree or less (white men: −1.05 years [95% CI, −1.15 to −0.94], white women: −1.14 years [95% CI, −1.24 to −1.04], and black men: −0.30 years [95% CI, −0.56 to −0.04]). White adults with some college education but no 4-year college degree experienced similar declines in life expectancy (men: −0.89 years [95% CI, −1.07 to −0.73], women: −0.59 years [95% CI, −0.77 to −0.42]).

In contrast, life expectancy at age 25 significantly increased among the college-educated (white men: 0.58 years [95% CI, 0.42 to 0.73], white women: 0.78 years [95% CI, 0.57 to 1.00], and black women: 1.70 years [95% CI, 0.91 to 2.53]).

The difference between high- and low-education groups increased from 2010 to 2017, largely because life-years lost to drug use increased among those with a high school degree or less (white men: 0.93 years [95% CI, 0.90 to 0.96], white women: 0.50 years [95% CI, 0.47 to 0.52], black men: 0.75 years [95% CI, 0.71 to 0.79], and black women: 0.28 years [95% CI, 0.25 to 0.31]).

Conclusions and Relevance:  In this serial cross-sectional study, estimated life expectancy at age 25 years declined overall between 2010 and 2017; however, it declined among persons without a 4-year college degree and increased among college-educated persons. Much of the increasing educational differences in years of life lost may be related to deaths attributed to drug use.

SOURCE 






Mass incarceration saved black America

The left has the luxury of having lost the argument on crime for the past few decades and, as a consequence, the electorate has no recollection of the living nightmare produced by Great Liberal Ideas About Crime.

Brooklyn hipsters blithely go about their business, completely unaware that their trendy neighborhoods were war zones in the 1970s, 1980s -- and well into the 1990s. Walking those streets meant you were taking your life into your hands.

Thanks to Republicans’ aggressive law-and-order policies, today, most U.S. cities are astonishingly safe. Crime is at its lowest level in decades. Life is possible again!

But Joe Biden, the leading Democratic candidate for president, is said to be hurt by the fact that, as The New York Times puts it, “he championed the 1994 crime bill that many experts now associate with mass incarceration.”

Point One: What’s the matter with “mass incarceration”?

Are we supposed to stop incarcerating people who commit crimes? Is that the argument? If there are hundreds of innocent people in prison, why do liberals keep giving us the fake sob stories -- the cases they lie about, forcing me to look up the facts, as illustrated in several of my recent columns?

Point Two: By “many experts,” the Times means “raving lunatics we keep on speed-dial for when we need a quote we agree with.”

In fact, the only theory by which Biden’s crime bill -- technically the “Clinton Crime Bill” -- attacked crime was by ushering in the first Republican Congress in 40 years, as a result of including the "assault weapons" ban in the bill.

In the very next election, just two months after the bill was signed, long-serving Democrats lost their seats, one after another after another.

Apart from that, the 1994 Crime Bill didn’t do much. There was “midnight basketball”; the “Violence Against Women Act” (feminist nonsense, later held unconstitutional by the Supreme Court); loads of pointless federal funding for local law enforcement; innumerable death penalties added for capital offenses committed on this or that federal property; and the aforementioned “assault weapons ban,” or “Gift From God to the GOP.”

But Biden and Clinton were at least savvy enough to know that Democrats had to try to steal the crime issue from Republicans, even if only with meaningless gestures.

Not today’s Democrats! Biden’s opponents seem to be competing for the title of “Candidate Most Likely to Return Murder and Mayhem to Our Streets”!

As with all the left’s insane ideas, they’re packaging this as an attack on “racism.” Let’s take a stroll down memory lane, for a reminder of who bears the brunt of cretinous liberal crime policies.

In the late 1980s, it was the Congressional Black Caucus that was demanding tougher policies in the war on drugs. At a three-day Congressional Black Caucus Legislative Weekend in September 1989, Rep. Charlie Rangel held hearing after hearing on the devastation crack cocaine was raining on the black community.

The CBC being Democrats, the gist of the hearing was to attack President George H.W. Bush ... for not fighting the war on drugs with sufficient ferocity. Thus, Rev. Jesse Jackson testified:

“(P)resident Bush's plan ... greatly underestimates the military arsenals and viciousness of the drug lords and pushers who not only have deadly firepower from AK-47s to Uzis, superior to the weapons of the police, they have a reckless attitude and no respect for human life. ...

“(Drug) pushers are terrorists. Those who consume drugs are engaged in treason against themselves, their families and their communities. ...

“We demand a right to volunteer in the army -- (audience applause) -- to fight a war on drugs.”

Throughout the 1980s, The New York Times was full of reports about the scourge of crack cocaine in neighborhoods “where Americans -- especially minorities -- do worst.”

There were stories of dealers preying on “poor blacks” who “coughed up enough $5 bills” for a vial of crack; an account of two little girls in the Bronx, children of crack-addicted mothers, “resorting to prostitution and falling prey to a (65-year-old) neighborhood man for $5 or $10”; and reports of dealers who “offered two-for-one deals and 'Mother's Day' specials timed to coincide with the arrival of welfare checks.”

A Washington Post-ABC News Poll, taken after President Bush gave a speech in 1989 announcing his “War on Drugs,” showed that 68% of black respondents approved of his plan -- or six times as many as voted for him. While only about half of white respondents characterized drugs as a “crisis” in their neighborhoods, two-thirds of African Americans did.

And then, in 1993, Rudy Giuliani became mayor of New York and saved the “ungovernable city." By the end of his two terms in office, murders in the city -- mostly blacks killing other blacks -- had been slashed from about 2,500 a year to 900. With subsequent mayors continuing his policies, whether with enthusiasm or out of fear of the voters, the murder rate has continued to fall.

Thousands of black people are alive today who otherwise would not be because of Giuliani’s tough-on-crime policies. As the Rev. Calvin Butts, pastor of Harlem’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, put it, without Giuliani, “we would have been overrun.”

If Jordan Peele wants a new idea for a conspiracy movie involving race, how about this one: Powerful liberals conspire to kill off black Americans and replace them with Mexicans by pushing lenient crime policies that put violent criminals into black neighborhoods, while simultaneously demanding open-borders immigration policies.

He can pick up some script ideas this Thursday, at the third Democratic presidential debate.

SOURCE 







CNN's Psychotic 9/11 Take: White Right-Wingers Are the Real Terrorists

It was a real race to the bottom between CNN and The New York Times on Wednesday to see which could have the most God-awful hot take on the eighteenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

CNN senior political analyst John Avlon wrote an opinion piece that began well enough but then went off the rails:

"And here's a startling statistic: since the 9/11 attacks, right-wing terrorists have killed more people in America than jihadist terrorists, according to the  New America think tank.
There are some folks who, for their own political purposes, would like to keep the focus on one form of political violence over another."

The New America study cited is a bit problematic. It takes every white guy nut job who's committed violence in the last eighteen years and lumps them into an amorphous ideological blob. Many were "reportedly" tied to this or that fringe group.

I'm not intending to trivialize any deaths, but the body count numbers cited in the study are 107 and 104. So, basically the same. The only big difference is that one side represents a disparate group of lunatics motivated by a variety of things, and the other all by the same thing. That means that the latter group is still by far the biggest danger.

Lumping every racist and anti-Semite in America into the "right-wing" is also a bit of a stretch, but you do you, CNN.

While Avlon used the phrase "right-wing terrorists" in the op-ed post, he and the CNN folks became a little more economical with their words when he was talking about it on-air:

By almost any interpretation of the phrase, I am a "right-winger," as are many of you reading this. We're all terrorists according to CNN!

This is the kind of media sleight of hand that is frequently used to demonize anyone who doesn't subscribe to leftist hive mind orthodoxy. Avlon likes to tout his credentials as a speechwriter for Rudy Giuliani as proof that he isn't out on a left limb, but he is working for CNN in the Trump era, so that notion can be dispensed with rather quickly.

That Avlon and CNN looked at 9/11 as a golden opportunity to advance a garbage political narrative says enough about how awful they are. That the narrative is only supportable if we ignore the almost 3000 people murdered by jihadists on the date being commemorated makes them complete and utter scum.

SOURCE 






How dare the BBC teach children that there are ‘100 genders’?

“What are the different gender identities?” asks a little boy in one of the nine new BBC Teach films put out to support the personal, social and health education (PSHE) curriculum in schools – to which his head teacher replies: “That’s a really, really exciting question…”

Actually, it’s not. And the answer is still less exciting.

Which is perhaps why rather than give the boy a bald, biological and distinctly boring fact – “two” – the video cuts to a Relationships and Sex Education teacher, hopped-up on her own gaping-mindedness: “You know, there are so many gender identities,” she enthuses. “We know that we have got male and female, but there are over 100, if not more, gender identities now.”

Even by today’s Emperor’s New Clothes gender diversity narrative, 100 is pushing it. ‘Woke’ Facebook currently lists 71 complex and hilariously repetitive options for those who feel manacled by the oh-so-reductive ‘male’ and ‘female’.

And, despite four years at medical school (where you’d hope the basics had been covered), your local GP will ‘only’ recognise six genders: male, female, gender-neutral, non-binary, gender-fluid and gender-queer.

But children, insists the BBC’s Relationships and Sex Education teacher Kate Daniels in the film, might well find these too limiting and think to themselves: “‘I don’t really want to be anything in particular. I am just going to be me.’”

Chart the gender-diversity madness back to its origins and you’ll find that “I am just going to be me” – ironically, a concept young, agenda-free children naturally embrace – is at the root of it all.

And beyond my horror at the propagation of misinformation and the upholding of this noxious nonsense by a corporation whose journalistic duty it is to deal not in fads, but facts, is the fear that we’ll make this new generation of children as self-obsessed as the supposed grown-ups wilfully warping their minds.

Self-expression may have been prized since Ancient Egyptians first began daubing hieroglyphics, but not until the 1960s did it start becoming fetishised in the way it is today, when ‘expressing yourself’ no longer means appreciating individuality and producing something of wider cultural value to be enjoyed by others – a work of art, say, that might enrich the world around you – but folding in on yourself and behaving in an unashamedly selfish way.

So like teenagers (with far more tools of ‘self-expression’ at their disposal than the old hair-dye, piercings and tattoos we had to make do with), people will play around with their identities and pronouns well into adulthood: going into work dressed as Alex one day and Alexia the next. Because they’ve been told they can.

Never mind that the client has no idea who they’ll be meeting from one day to the next, and that taking your personal whimsies into the workplace is the apotheosis of unprofessionalism, you’re just “expressing yourself”, aren’t you? Along with all the myriad incarnations of that wonderful, bottomless you.

Likewise, the health and nutritional idiosyncrasies we all now like to shout from the rooftops – “I can’t eat that! I’m vegan/Keto/5:2-ing” – are pure self-expression, and therefore hallowed. So whereas I was brought up to leave anything I couldn’t or wouldn’t eat discreetly on the side of the plate, we must all now be made to know and care about other people’s foibles.

As women, we’re encouraged to express ourselves by “locating our period pride” and brandishing tampons in the office, before “talking loud and proud” about the menopause once we start going through that. And perhaps I’d find all this self-expression a little more exciting in exactly the way that Relationships and Sex Education teacher found the idea of 100+ genders if it were focussed on something less superficial and narcissistic.

And, of course, it’s all a lie. Because what the 9 to 12-year-old children in those BBC videos weren’t told was that they would only be free to express themselves in one way: the right way.

So that if one of the girls later chose to express herself in a more traditional manner – say, by wearing a skirt – secondary schools like Lewes’s now infamous Priory School, which this term made “gender-neutral” trousers compulsory for new and existing students, that would not be allowed. In fact, she would be turned away at the school gates.

All of which is likely to leave us with a generation of lost, confused and angry young adults asking a question we will find it very difficult to answer: “How did you let this happen?”

SOURCE 







Australia: Indigenous TV host claims she was racially profiled by police while buying a bottle of wine in Australia's Outback.  But was she?

A reader writes: "I have noticed that police in Northern Australia are generally friendly and chatty with the public.

I expect that in conversation with the female police officer in the bottle shop, Ms Grant informed her that she is filming a documentary in some areas around Alice Springs in which the police officer knew to be areas where alcohol is banned.

And the police officer would know that Ms Grant is from Sydney and may be unfamiliar with alcohol banned areas around Alice Springs. So the police officer considerately reminded Ms Grant not to take alcohol into those areas as penalties apply... Just a police officer doing her job.

In calling it racist, I expect Ms Grant has taken it the wrong way, either knowingly as part of maintaining a sense of victimhood, or, as an innocent misunderstanding.

However, Ms Grant is a smart, educated and well informed news presenter and documentary maker, who, for a living, encourages others to feel victimised and outraged, so I would bet money that she is playing the victim and knows very well the police officer was just kindly doing her job. And if so, then that would make Ms Grant the racist"


An indigenous TV host claims she was racially profiled by a police officer while buying a bottle of wine in the Northern Territory.

Karla Grant, the host of SBS program Living Black, said she was targeted by a female police officer at a BWS Alice Springs who thought she was illegally buying alcohol to re-sell.

Grant told the Women In Media national conference on the Gold Coast on Friday that what followed was 'totally racist,' ABC reported.

'She focused in on me and said "have you got any ID? where are you staying?" I was so shocked and she didn't ask for my producer's ID, she just asked me, she really focused in on me,' Grant said.

Karla Black, the host of SBS program Living Black, said she was stopped by a police officer in Alice Springs who thought she was illegally buying alcohol to re-sell    +2
Karla Black, the host of SBS program Living Black, said she was stopped by a police officer in Alice Springs who thought she was illegally buying alcohol to re-sell

'She said "you know there's penalties for this?" She was implying I was a grog runner, that I was getting alcohol to take to a restricted area,' Grant said.

Grant said the police officer continued to harass her, asking her where she was staying and why she was there.

The TV host said her producer was 'fuming' from the police officer's attitude. 

'He was like "oh my God, this is so racist". I happened to run into a friend who was coming into the alcohol store as well and I told him what happened and … he said "it happens to us all the time".

Grant said that while racism in Alice Springs is on the decline, it's still an underlying problem within the community.

Northern Territory Police said they weren't 'aware' of the incident.

Grant said that when driving around Sydney and other big cities, she will detour to avoid police cars out of fear of being harassed. She said being racially targeted by police is common concern for indigenous people.

SOURCE  

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 

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