Suicide Watch

The old joke Washington Post headline, "Meteor to Obliterate Earth, Women and Minorities Hardest Hit" works because it's a fair description of a well worn media template, getting more worn by the day in our Current Year of Salon-Vox-Slate thumb-suckers: "social effect x occurs, protected class(es) disproportionately affected".

There's always been an unacknowledged concomitant to this model--a once implicit now explicit stricture: there are no particular white concerns or needs, there is only "privilege". Indeed, whites faring better than the norm on any given metric is always evidence of privilege, not agency or virtue. The joke could just as well have been "Meteor to Obliterate Earth,  Whites Least Affected".

When researchers first started reporting evidence of rising mortality in white America they were pilloried for concerning themselves with white health. One common response to its mention (see Salon-Vox-Slate) is to note whites are still ahead of blacks and browns in wealth and health. If you buy into blank-slate notions you see this as a straight measure of "privilege"; if you buy into common sense you see this as the measure of ruin left in the nation.

Whites have lost the ability to see the crime in this because we've been stripped of the concept of "us" by the reigning cultural order. The dying off of white Americans is a direct result of the same culture that suppresses its notice, much less analysis or address as such. Like rising mortality in a wealthy society, this is without historical precedent, a people unable to see themselves as such--at least one not physically conquered.

The Wall Street Journal

Life expectancy for Americans fell again last year, despite growing recognition of the problems driving the decline and federal and local funds invested in stemming them.

Data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released on Thursday show life expectancy fell by one-tenth of a year, to 78.6 years, pushed down by the sharpest annual increase in suicides in nearly a decade and a continued rise in deaths from powerful opioid drugs like fentanyl. Influenza, pneumonia and diabetes also factored into last year’s increase.

Economists and public-health experts consider life expectancy to be an important measure of a nation’s prosperity. The 2017 data paint a dark picture of health and well-being in the U.S., reflecting the effects of addiction and despair, particularly among young and middle-aged adults, as well as diseases plaguing an aging population and people with lower access to health care.

“The continuation of this trend is a warning for all of us that our country has not found a way of addressing the profound needs of the people who are dying,” said Eric Caine, professor of psychiatry and director of the Injury Control Research Center for Suicide Prevention at the University of Rochester Medical Center. “While the economy may be recovering at the macro level, it’s very uncertain whether it’s affecting the lives of these people.”  

The U.S. has lost three-tenths of a year in life expectancy since 2014, a stunning reversal for a developed nation, and lags far behind other wealthy nations... 

White men and women fared the worst, along with black men, all of whom experienced increases in death rates. Death rates rose in particular for adults ages 25 to 44, and suicide rates are highest among people in the nation’s most rural areas. On the other hand, deaths declined for black and Hispanic women, and remained the same for Hispanic men.

Black men continue to lead in mortality (suffered and dealt), ironically enough (and this is just my racist opinion) by living it up, via a thriving hip hop culture--which is part and parcel of the broader culture in which whites are not thriving.

Elite whites would do well to drop their hostility to white identity--just as declining morals infect a population by welling from the bottom up, so will their consequences.

Homeless and Hopeless

James LaFond has a brush with the future:

On my way into the supermarket today, I got to thinking about how the bottle return areas of large supermarkets remind me of what an ancient slave market might have looked like. The dregs of society, conquered and diseased, standing in line, awaiting an uncertain, but sure to be unkind future. The number of homeless seems to be growing exponentially, to such a point that, given the current trend, we’ll all be homeless one day.

Both the bottle return station--probably not as bad here as in his neighborhood, but inspiring the same feeling of dread--and the increase in homeless people are depressing realities here. Hobos crawl through downtown scavenging up recyclables along with anything else they can use at night, sometimes angrily leaving piles of garbage around dumpsters they've broken into. The trash cans on the street are locked in little cages so they won't be turned over. I've seen more than one homeless man furiously pulling and kicking away at one of these.

A little while later, as I walked back out to my car with half a cartload of groceries, I see someone sitting on the hood of my car. I’m a easy going type, so I cordially observe, “You’re on my car, dude.”

Like a flash, he hops off to face me, and I notice the hunting knife in his left hand. “So what about it, huh?” he inquired, while moving within a couple feet of me. His eyes tell me that he’s tweaked.
Wait a second. “What’s up Mike? I didn’t recognize you without your glasses.”

He smiles and tells me he lost them during the last snow storm. While we talk, he keeps the knife behind his back, blade pointed outward, tilting it back and forth, rocking on his heels, and craning his neck this way and that to get a better look at his surroundings.

“What’s with the knife?”, I ask.

It’s so motherfuckers know. Keep away! Danger! HaHa.”
His mental state has deteriorated since the last time I saw him. We used to be neighbors.

Mike’s in his late 40’s, and looks older. He talks with the sibilant “S” that is indicative of long term meth use. He’s become what I call a TOM. Tweaker On Mountainbike. I actually witnessed the moment he joined the ranks of the city’s homeless population.

In the late seventies PCP was introduced, and flowed into my Norwalk neighborhood by way of Compton. The drug is devastating, and long abuse left users with slurred speech. They became known as "mush heads" locally.

More homeless appear better outfitted with tents. They can pitch them right on the sidewalk overnight downtown. One remarkably elaborate construction, combining tarps, umbrellas and other things, last I checked, appears each night and is gone each morning on the same patch of sidewalk near a church.
A small encampment on a plot of land across from a church that feeds them will appear and grow, and then grow menacing, before being taken down by the police, and starting the cycle anew. The night belongs to the homeless in downtown Portland, and in the day they move about with visible frustration and difficulty, having to navigate the normies. Crazies walking down the middle of a boulevard mid-day are fairly common; people barely react.

The next political movement to challenge the status quo, whatever it is, will have to be some part therapeutic. It must seek to reclaim and heal some part of those lost to degeneracy, sloth and foolishness.
Won't be long til summer comes.

The Current Year is Druggy, Druggy, Druggy

Everybody's high. That's what I'm thinking.

Via Thomas Wictor on Twitter here's a video Seattle Police released regarding an officer-involved shooting.
First we see a confrontation between an apartment manager and a wigger Bonnie and Clyde, presumably the same pair firing at police later. The male's behavior leading up to his shooting appears suicidal, but nothing he's done up to that point makes any sense, so who knows.

 

No doubt they'll find a pharmaceutical cocktail in this guy's blood, and certainly some of the high-grade marijuana you can buy legally in Washington State now, the excessive use of which has introduced a yet-understood illness characterized by "screaming and nausea". This unfortunate couple represents a new feral class; drugs play a large part in their de-socialization.

But I'm beginning to suspect increased drug use is affecting most aspects of life and classes of people now. CNN's recent screw-up--whether bad reporting or bad hoaxing--was so remarkably inept I found myself wondering, like the old joke, what they were smoking over there. Truly.

In his recent interview with Luke Ford Greg Johnson suggests drug use is endemic in the "alt right" (which he doesn't identify with, despite being a white nationalist) and sees the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally as a drug or alcohol induced disaster.



You can't help but wonder nowadays, when you see something sloppy or just inexplicable.

Anderson Cooper elicited minor controversy with a tweet recently mocking President Trump. I really can't keep up, because I would have thought this relatively mild insult was par for the Trump Resistance course, but apparently this is still out of bounds:

Alcohol and a lack of immediate diversion are usually enough to explain such as this. Cooper said his phone was "hacked" at first, and now is just saying it was "taken" and the tweet posted (as if by no human hand). A mischievous twink was one of my first preferred suspicions, and this explanation strengthens it. Whatever the case, you can be sure drugs had something to do with it all.

Perhaps drugs are shaping our political views--they would have to if their use is broad enough. Would white ethno-masochism be possible without them? Are the kinds of drugs, legal and illegal, we've acquired along the way shaping our collective worldview? Certainly drugs are helping white Americans right now with the indignity and anxiety of dispossession, easing them along.
And that's a downer.