The Soviet Parallels of Fishtown’s Middle-Aged White Male Mortality Crisis

The newly released paper by Anne Case and Angus Deaton showing that mortality rates amongst middle-aged White American males (MAWAM) increased from 1999-2013 has been generating a lot of discussion of late. This mortality increase was concentrated amongst MAWAMs with a high school degree or less (“Fishtown,” to borrow from Charles Murray’s archetype of a White working class town), who now have a mortality rate even greater than that of US Blacks with their much-discussed health and violent crime problems. But mortality continued falling amongst the better educated Whites (“Belmont,” Murray’s archetypical White American upper middle class suburb).

This mortality increase was apparently driven by a surge in deaths from external causes, especially poisonings, suicide, and chronic liver cirrhosis. Even MAWAMs with a BS degree or higher saw a tiny increase in deaths from external causes, to the extent that MAWAMs are now more likely to die from external causes in their middle age than Latinos, or even Blacks.

us-mortality-1999-2013

It is worth pointing out that it seems to be a very unusual pattern relative not just to other ethnic groups in the US but to other developed European and Anglo countries. The graph below shows all-cause mortality for 45-54 year old MAWAMs relative to their peers in France, Germany, the UK, Canada, Australia, and Sweden. Americans went from being middle of the pack to an outlier.

us-mortality-compared-1999-2013

As someone familiar with Russian demographic history, this was a depressingly familiar pattern to me.

Russian demographic history 101: By the mid-1960s, Russian life expectancy – both male and female – had basically converged with that of the First World.

Then it essentially stagnated… for half a century.

russian-male-life-expectancy

Remarkably, a Russian 50 year old man in 1964 had a smaller chance of dying (1,129/100,000 annually) than his grandson in 2010 (1,655/100,000) – regardless of all the medical advances in the intervening half century.

This mortality tsunami was driven by a huge rise in alcoholism from the 1960s, coupled with the Soviet Union’s lack of interest in creating a modern hi-tech medical system (as the West started to do in earnest from the 1970s). Although there was a modest interruption to these negative trends in the mid-to-late 1980s, when there was a modest improvement thanks to Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign, the decline resumed with a vengeance in the 1990s as the Soviet state lost its monopoly on vodka production and vodka prices plummeted. In the 2000s things started looking up again, as the Putin government raised excise taxes on vodka, invested in modern medical care, and changing social mores and the labor discipline promoted by capitalist economics started making binge drinking less cool. Even so, as of 2015, the health profiles of Russian men – though far improved relative to the days of the late Brezhnev, to say nothing of Yeltsin – have yet to exceed their mid-1960s peaks.

Although there were some “bad trends” in terms of healthy lifestyle in the West as well from the 197os – it was from this period onwards that the US got started on its obesity epidemic – these were much less detrimental to overall health than the hardcore vodka binge drinking that became prevalent in Soviet life by the 1970s, and their negative effects were in any case more than fully counteracted by vast improvements in emergency response and cardiac medical care.

The great stagnation in MAWAM mortality in the 1990s and 2000s revealed by Case and Deaton – down to the social differentiation, with the situation improving slightly in well-educated, upper class Belmont, but positively plummeting in poorly-educated, lower class Fishtown and more than cancelling out improvements in Belmont so far as MAWAMs as a whole are considered – seems to have a striking parallel with what happened after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Although the post-Soviet mortality crisis was felt across all social groups, it impacted middle-aged Russian men (MARMs) especially hard. Mortality for the best educated segments of the population, while rising initially in the early 1990s, quickly reversed and soon fell below Soviet-era levels. In contrast, the lower class Russians – the “gopnik” class of popular culture – have far poorer health today (despite the Putin era recovery) than even in the most vodka-drenched days of the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s. Here is a 2005 article from the American Journal of Public Health:

The mortality advantage of better-educated men and women in 1980 increased substantially by 2001. In 1980, life expectancy at age 20 for university-educated men was 3 years greater than for men with elementary education only, but was 11 years greater by 2001, reflecting not only declining life expectancy in less-educated men but also an improvement among better-educated men. Similar patterns were seen in women.

Looking at causes of mortality, mortality increases were driven above all by the rise in deaths from poisonings – almost exclusively alcohol deaths, in Russia’s case – and associated factors, such as deaths from external causes (these are linked: When you imbibe vodka in regular binges, you will be more likely to commit suicide, have car accidents, murder your drinking partners in a fit of drunken homicidal rage, etc). Moreover, increases in alcohol death were also reflected in and magnified to a large extent by deaths from cardiovascular diseases – chronic bingeing, needless to say, has bad effects on your overall health – which was further compounded by Russia’s traditional lack of modern medical facilities to treat expensive modern ailments. That is because neither the USSR nor Yeltsinite Russia cared much for the health and welfare of ordinary Russians: So far as the Soviets were concerned, the main thing was to get people through military and reproductive age in more or less adequate shape, and not bother themselves overmuch with what happened to them from their 50s; while the oligarchs who ruled Russia from behind the scenes in the 1990s didn’t care even about that.

To be sure, there are also major differences between the American and Russian experiences. For instance, in Russia, the 1990s and 2000s saw a big dip, and then a big recovery back to late Gorbachev levels of MARM mortality, whereas the mortality rates of MAWAMs simply stagnated at a more or less steady level throughout from 1990 to 2013.

And critically, 1980s Soviet mortality levels themselves began from a much higher base relative to the US. While according to Case and Deaton’s graph MAWAM annual mortality levels for the 45-54 age group were 415/100,000 in 2013, rising to 736/100,000 for poorly educated MAWAMs, that is still far less than the 1,655/100,000 mortality rate for 50 year old MARMs in 2010 (or even in 2014 when it is now perhaps 1,300/100,000).

Nonetheless, regardless of the fact that the US mortality crisis is far less severe in absolute terms, and didn’t undergo the catastrophic “spike” that post-Soviet Russia experienced, the similarities – a major demographic group experiencing a sustained deterioration in its mortality prospects over a period of decades in an industrialized country – are otherwise quite remarkable.

Steve Sailer suggests that the cause of this might be in the stress inflicted on poorer MAWAM workers by mass immigration and other woeful trends:

Perhaps painkiller overdoses, mental health declines, reported pain, disability, dropping out of the labor force, lower wages, and The Big Unmentionable (immigration) all tie together. As Hispanics flooded in, lowering wages, blue collar whites felt less motivated to stay in the labor force as they aged and their bodies got creakier. Getting on disability requires, I imagine, an ability to get doctors and other authority figures to believe your account of musculoskeletal and/or mental health disabilities. The most effective way to get other people to believe you are disabled by physical and mental pain is to believe it yourself. And if you tell the doctor your back is killing you so much you can’t work and you persuade him, he’ll likely write you a prescription for some pills.

Or perhaps it was the 1960s Big Party generation finally burning itself out:

I think there is definitely a pattern in that coming of age in the Late 1960s / 1970s seem to have taken a toll on people, leaving them more vulnerable to dying of overdoses, suicide, and alcoholism later in life.

It’s kind of like how homeless people and AIDS sufferers started showing up in the 1980s. There are all sorts of explanations for these separate effects, some valid, some tendentious, but a common theme that’s almost totally overlooked today is that the 1970s were a Big Party and that took its toll on some people.

Then there is my 2013 post on health inequalities in the US, in which I noticed that unlike Blacks, Asians, and Latinos – whose counterparts abroad have universally lower life expectancies – US Whites are near the bottom of the life expectancy league tables of other majority White countries.

In contrast, US White life expectancy is equivalent to that in not fully developed Chile, and Denmark, the shortest-lived West European country.

us-life-expectancy-by-race

This is pretty strange for a country supposedly dominated by “structural racism” and discrimination against its minorities (as many European and American Leftists allege).

Some speculations as to the cause of this pattern were advanced by myself and other people in the comments. One by the commentator Thorfinsson was particularly intriguing:

Extreme Hispanic apathy probably results in good mental health and thus longer lifespans. In America our abundance allows them to achieve the rusty pickup trucks, crappy houses with cars parked on the lawn, Tecate beer (‘scuse me that’s CERVEZA), and 24/7 access to their desired entertainment of telenovelas and pro-wrestling.

As for Asian-Americans being longer lived than their coethnics across the Pacific, I suspect America’s more laid back culture makes for better mental health than the cram and shame obsessed cultures back home.

White Americans on the other hand not only have less healthy lifestyles than their cousins across the pond, but are constantly bombarded with propaganda about how evil they and their ancestors are. Unlike less introspective and curious peoples, they are also given to introspection and moral neurosis. Not a good recipe for good mental or physical health.

But I doubt the explanation is as simple as any of those.

Note that the mortality prospects of middle-aged men in the developed European countries, not to mention Canada and Australia, have continued to improve throughout the 1990s and 2000s, even though many of them too have had a lot of Third World immigrants. That train left the station in the 1960s, not the 2010s, today’s angry rhetoric regardless.

And Yuropeans have been partying at least as hard as Americans since the 1970s. In fact, as someone who has lived in both the UK and the US, I can attest that the prevalence of binge drinking is FAR higher in Britain. Even so, it does not impose a heavy mortality burden even there. That is because British binge drinking mostly occurs amongst robust 16-25 year olds youngsters and only lasts for an evening. The sort of reckless binge drinking that afflicted Russia – and in earlier times, Finland – carried on throughout life and not infrequently degenerated into alcohol layovers lasting several days. Moreover, the “party hard” and recreational drugs culture in both Britain and the US is more of a Belmont thing, while the denizens of Fishtown have to work hard to put food on their family, and in jobs where they are much more likely to be tested for drugs besides.

As for Thorfinsson’s hypothesis, it is entertaining but not very serious. It is intellectual White liberals who read Howard Zinna and agonize over white guilt and have a growing cuckoldry fetish. They are also precisely those MAWAMs whose mortality rates have continued falling.

Otherwise, explanations from the “Left,” like increasing inequality .are not particularly persuasive either. Why didn’t it affect Blacks and Hispanics, who mortality rates continued falling? And besides, virtually the entire world got a great deal more unequal after 1990. Nonetheless, that didn’t stop Western Europe and other Anglo offshots from continuing to improve middle-aged male mortality rates.

Some suggest a connection between neoliberal reform and rising mortality. Contrary to that, after a brief mortality shock in the early 1990s, even decommunizing countries with their own “shock therapies” like Poland started to rapidly increase their life expectancy. This suggests that the primary cause of Russia’s mortality crisis in the 1990s and early to mid 2000s was not so much the much-hated “shock therapy,” as suggested in a famous 2009 Lancet article, but the specific fact of the collapse of the state’s authority, which expressed itself in the loss of control over the hard liquor monopoly, as well as the inability to check the proliferation of underground moonshine operations to serve the alcohol needs of the most far gone Russian alcoholics. At the end of the day, the simple fact was that hard booze got a lot cheaper, and there were many Russians who were willing to take advantage of it. Since vodka is so dominant as a driver of Russian mortality, to the extent that neoliberal reform was responsible for the 1990s Russian mortality crisis, it was because it made cheap hard alcohol more accessible to many Russians.

To wrap this up – while I don’t have any particularly good explanations for the great stagnation in MAWAM mortality prospects, I will suggest the following scenario:

As Case and Deaton state, from the mid-1990s, the US pharma industry has pushed all sorts of painkiller prescriptions including opioids onto the American population. Americans enthusiastically gobbled them up to deal with the bodily pains and discomforts caused by the contemporaneous advance of the obesity epidemic.

The increase in midlife morbidity and mortality among US white non-Hispanics is only partly understood. The increased availability of opioid prescriptions for pain that began in the late 1990s has been widely noted, as has the associated mortality (14, 20‒22). The CDC estimates that for each prescription painkiller death in 2008, there were 10 treatment admissions for abuse, 32 emergency department visits for misuse or abuse, 130 people who were abusers or dependent, and 825 nonmedical users (23). Tighter controls on opioid prescription brought some substitution into heroin and, in this period, the US saw falling prices and rising quality of heroin, as well as availability in areas where heroin had been previously largely unknown (14, 24, 25).

While rising obesity and the growing reach of the pharma industry has been prevalent throughout the First World in the past two decades, nowhere have both of these trends gone as far as in the United States. Possibly it is their combination that has magnified the effects of each to create a much bigger overall effect on the segment of the population most vulnerable to them?

So why, then, did this trend not affect Blacks and Hispanics? After all, their obesity crises are even bigger than those of White Americans. They are also far poorer than Whites. However, possibly their innately much more positive outlooks – Latinos clearly have a higher joie de vivre, while even the poorest Blacks have higher levels of self esteem than the richest Whites – might have translated into a tendency to use fewer pain meds, and perhaps greater defenses against getting seriously hooked on them or gatewaying into stuff like heroin and deciding to end their lives, as far more neurotic Whites are wont to do. In other words, Africanist rhetoric about the psychological dispositions of Sun People vs. Ice People does have some validity to it.

East Asians are relatively neurotic too. But they are also the one racial group in the US that is not having a major obesity crisis, plus their high average IQ ensures few of them live in depressed Fishtown anyway. Their mortality profile has therefore also continued to improve unimpeded.

In effect, maybe MAWAMs have won a sort of genetic anti-lottery: Intelligent enough to be deeply neurotic and prone to suicide, but not intelligent enough to almost entirely avoid Fishtown like Asian-Americans; and wealthy and privileged enough to have bottle of Vicodin as a retirement plan, but not wealthy or genetically endowed enough to avoid obesity on a large scale, which in turn further feeds into the pain meds and neuroticism spiral.

Last but not least, they live in a country where untramelled market forces and technological preeminence have resulted in the complete commercialization of agriculture and healthcare, paradoxically resulting in suboptimal outcomes like the spread of cheap empty carb diets that have led to mass obesity, and the usage of addictive and harmful pharma products to treat those very symptoms.

I am not sure this is anywhere near the correct explanation but I have yet to hear of anything more convincing.

Finally, it’s worth pointing out at least in passing that it is precisely these Fishtown MAWAMs who constitute the core of Donald Trump’s support base. The ordinary, lower class Russians hit hardest by the 1990s mortality shock – for instance, the Uralvagonzavod workers, so despised by Western liberal journalists – are likewise the class showing the biggest support for Putin. As such, this is just the latest if rather small commonality on which there is a kind of Trump-Putin convergence.

Anatoly Karlin is a transhumanist interested in psychometrics, life extension, UBI, crypto/network states, X risks, and ushering in the Biosingularity.

 

Inventor of Idiot’s Limbo, the Katechon Hypothesis, and Elite Human Capital.

 

Apart from writing booksreviewstravel writing, and sundry blogging, I Tweet at @powerfultakes and run a Substack newsletter.

Comments

  1. Another Canadian says

    Last but not least, they live in a country where untramelled market forces and technological preeminence have resulted in the complete commercialization of agriculture and healthcare, paradoxically resulting in suboptimal outcomes like the spread of empty carb diets that have led to mass obesity, and the usage of addictive and harmful pharma products to treat its symptoms.

    I think you’ve found the secret sauce recipe. Corn flakes and oxycontin.

  2. Drip, drip, drip loss of confidence in institutions. One Joe Bob at a time.

  3. Fishtown is linguistically Germanic, Belmont is Romance. Germanics got aquainted with Romans more than two thousand years ago, and throughout this whole time, for almost 100 generations, Romance words have continued to sound more upscale to them than Germnic ones.

  4. Anyone who grew up in or worked in rust belt blue collar areas over the last 30+ years knows the cause.

  5. Looking at bright side. Mean white IQ will go up if this continues. Naturally eugenic white americans.

    Rushton once said European renaissance was due to black death which disproportionately killed off low class people and created bright pupulation after mass death.

  6. One of they key things that sets apart binge drinking in Russia from that in much of Western Europe is that many more Russian alcoholics were broke and desperate enough to turn to moonshine, rubbing alcohol, and cleaning supplies to get high, which produces a much greater mortality rate.

  7. The fact is out. But the cause is unclear. All speculations are fine, which will help guide reseach to find evidence. For religious people, they will try to find explanation in religious context. For ideologues, they will try to pigeonhle this into their ideological doctrine. For scientists, they will look at all possibilities with research to collect objective evidences.

    The problem is that certain people can not tell the difference between hypothese and truth. They will take whatever they believe as truth and act on it.

  8. BurplesonAFB says

    Do middle aged deaths reduce the fertility of a population?

  9. Honestly I do not know. Based on fertility pattern of modern life, it should have some small impact theoratically due to later marriage/first child born trend.

  10. Mean white IQ will go up

    The left side is not the problem; the problem is the “stupid” right side.

  11. The cause is the same everywhere – oligarch filth.

    The difference between countries is the scale and effectiveness of the safety net.

  12. In 1997 the US legalized direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs. The only other country to allow this is New Zealand.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-to-consumer_advertising

  13. Quite legally, doctors throughout the West get paid by pharmaceutical companies to prescribe their products. Doctors are influenced by such incentives.

  14. Part of the reason for that in English is that the French speaking Normans ruled England and thus Romance language had elite prestige.

  15. The Black Death and other similar plagues in Europe tended to kill off urban residents, for obvious reasons, such as merchants and craftsmen, while affecting the peasantry in rural areas much less.

  16. Philip Owen says

    If Glasgow, Liverpool and South Wales were cherry picked, I suspect that the UK would show a similar pattern. They are notorious for CV disease and rising levels of liver disease.

  17. I would say that for both Russian men in the 1990s and working class white American men today, drugs and alcohol are symptoms, not the cause. Both groups grew up with a sense of themselves as mainstays of great political forces, and both came to feel disinherited. Offhand I can’t think of any other population groups who have had reason to feel a similar sense of disinheritance.

  18. Simon in London says

    Easy access to opiate painkillers is the one big difference between UK and USA, so I think this explanation is plausible. The UK NHS always underprescribes painkillers, in the US they are much more generous.

  19. Glasgow has long been known for its poor health and it’s a hell of a lot less grotty than Dundee. Some of the city is quite nice. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_effect

  20. http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/record-numbers-antidepressants-uk-1446223

    The UK now has the seventh highest prescribing rate for antidepressants in the western world and twice as many people are now taking drugs than they were ten years ago.

  21. Expect so. Combination of diet, lifestyle, economic and social changes (decline in working class and even middle class jobs, decline in religiousity, decline in national/patriotic beliefs). If you have little to live for…

    Not unlike those pre Columbian societies in the US that just collapsed on contact with the Conquistadors.

  22. The UK NHS always underprescribes painkillers

    Yes in France of Germany they have pet physical diagnoses, but in the UK they are far less sympathetic, and if you complain of feeling aches and pains without an obvious reason the average doctor will assume you have a mental problem.

  23. “The UK NHS always underprescribes painkillers, in the US they are much more generous.” I have read an assertion that’s exactly the opposite. Does anyone have any facts on this topic?

    Come to think of it, the assertion I read was, if my poor memory serves, particularly about hospital use for those near to a painful death. In other words, the assertion was (or may have been) that UK hospital doctors were much more humane to late stage cancer patients, for example.

  24. I had always thought that East Asians have a fairly high suicide rate.

    Peter

  25. Country music provides an insight into the blue collar / redneck health crisis in the US. A large percentage of the songs revolve around alcohol consumption, perhaps best stated in “Nothing To Do But Drink”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcYxA1Gikm4

  26. There is suicide but maybe we need a new term to describe something even more dire:

    REPROCIDE or REPLICIDE.

    Reproduction-cide or Replicate-cide.

    In a way, reprocide is more dangerous than suicide.
    Suppose a man has three children and then later kills himself in suicide. He may have ended in a bad way, but he still produced three life forms before he died.

    Now, suppose a man doesn’t commit suicide and lives to ripe old age before he dies of illness. But suppose he had no kid. He has committed reprocide and replicide. In a way, what he has done is worse cuz the ‘line of my people’ ended with him. He didn’t kill himself but he killed his lineage. He has committed LINEACIDE or lineage-cide.

    Most Europeans and most Japanese don’t commit suicide, but many of them are committing REPROCIDE, REPLICIDE, or LINEACIDE. They are aborters of the future of their race.

    This is deeply worrying.

  27. I think this is the self-destructive response of a people who once were the hard working backbone of American, but realize that no one needs them or gives a damn about them anymore. It’s the consequence of the disconnection from a sense of meaning, purpose, and the larger project of society.

    The declining economic status of the less educated portion of the white population is nothing compared to the loss of purpose in life that these people have experienced. It is the status of the dispossessed.

    I suspect the experience of dispossession is common to those who suffer rising death rates. And here’s a speculation: people who are low in clannishness and high in future orientation have a greater need for culturally provided teleology than those who live for their clan and live in the moment. Take that away and they suffer.

  28. The Plutonium Kid says

    A factor that seems to have been left out: Open contempt and hostility from both upper class whites and non-white minorities towards lower-income whites.

  29. The modern world is a moral, spiritual, and cultural disaster.

    If we wanna know what is good for humanity, we should first look to animals.

    After all, we are animals. We are animals with higher intelligence, richer emotions, deeper memory, and creativity. But we are animals, and we share basic characteristics with other mammals.

    So, before we talk of humans, suppose we talk of dogs.

    Suppose there is a dog, and we want it to grow healthy. What should we do?

    Should we feed it healthy food or feed it a lot of junk? Healthy food rich in nutrients good for dogs, of course.

    Should we just allow it to lie around the house or should we take it for walks?

    Of course, we should take it for walks. Dogs need exercise.

    Should we let it just play with plastic artificial toys or should we also make time to make it wander outside to sniff stuff, run around, play fetch, and be exploratory with its senses? Of course, we should offer it some adventure.

    Should we let it act like a retardo dog or should we train it so that it will behave and act like a proper dog? Of course, dogs need training.

    And there are other issues as well, but we know what is good for a dog.

    Humans are more than dogs, but much of what applies to dogs applies to humans.

    Humans need good food, not junk food advertised and promoted by the food industry.

    People need physical activity, not just sitting in front of TV or computer.

    People need discipline.

    People need a sense of belonging. Dogs don’t have history, but they do have memory, and it’s good for the dog to bond with and become a member of a family. It’s not good for a dog to pass from one house to another to another. Same goes for people. People need a sense of history, home, belonging, continuity, and identity. Otherwise, alienation sets in.

    And even though modernism and youth-centered pop culture opened up lots of interesting avenues and range of experimentation, they should not be the core culture of a people. Too much of it is ugly, demented, degenerate, decadent, trashy, putrid, puerile, confused, hideous, and etc. Now, ugliness and dementedness have their value as well in art and shouldn’t be banned by censorship, but they shouldn’t be the core culture of a people. When that stuff becomes the core culture, people’s lives revolve around tattoos, piercings, homo-worship, infantilism, narcissism, vanity, and etc.

    Also, a dog cannot act like a puppy all its life. When it grows up, it must take on dog-like behavior. Likewise, we need kids to grow into adults. But we don’t have that. Culturally and behaviorally, people no longer grow up. 40 is the new 18, 50 is the new 25.

    Though culture works differently than food and physical health, there are certain parallels. There is culture as poison. There is culture as filth and sewage. There is culture as rot, like so many Tarantino movies that are tardo and ugly. They may be clever and fun at times, but they are destructive of the soul. So much of our culture if vile and ugly and destroying of the soul. It tempts young people with raw sexuality and thug fantasies.

    True culture must develop the mind. A culture of pure faith is too naive. It leads to religious dogma or political conformism. But a culture of cynicism is also wrong, because it makes us glibly complacent in distrusting everything. It also makes us mentally lazy with an attitude that assumes that nothing is worth learning since everything is BS.

    Culture must be connected with nature and its complexities. Problem with Nazi culture was it was too antiseptic and germ-freakish. Culture must be of the blood, of the soil. Nazi culture was too much of the concrete and steel. Today’s capitalist culture is of sugar and sewage.

    Processed and refined foods may taste good but they are bad for us. it’s better to eat natural foods. Our pop culture distills and refines what gives maximum pleasure or thrills. So, they are totally sexual or totally thuggish. It’s all about fuc*king or fighting. It’s all about ‘extreme’ this or ‘extreme’ that.

    We also need a sense of culture and history and identity apart from ideology and fashion. When ideology takes over, you have children turning their parents into authorities. You have people who think they are entirely correct because they adhere to current political orthodoxy. It’s like what happened during the Cultural Revolution in China. Mao directed young people who’d been severed from tradition to go on a massive rampage and destroy much of China’s cultural heritage.

    But fashion and pop culture can also destroy one’s deeper sense of culture and history. With no sense of where one came from and what one’s people went through to survive and forge an identity and heritage, one’s culture is purely about pop culture and fashion. Today, so many white Americans have no sense of history or identity. They just rely on PC to tell that what is right(according to latest academic fads) and fashion to tell them what is hip and cool. It is no wonder that ‘gay marriage’ and tranny-mania are all the rage. A people cut off from history and heritage will see such triviality as the moral imperative of the age. It is a culture severed from the roots.

    For people to regain health, they must reconnect with history and heritage. They must reassert their identity. They must identify the enemies of their identity and heritage.

    Religion is no longer enough. Religion is about faith, but we need more than faith to get through the coming storm. Also, while children may follow faith, as they grow up and come under the pressure of PC and fashion, they will find religion boring and dull and lame compared to all the cool stuff. If you want to build immunity in your children against this the two PCs — political correctness and pop culture — , you must introduce them to real culture of the arts, history, philosophy, and etc. And it’s not enough to give your kid a book and tell him to read it. You must read it yourself and start a discussion with your kids.

    If you instill your kids with Real Culture, they may enjoy pop culture, but they will see it for what it is. They won’t fall for pop culture as the main culture. It’s like if you instill proper eating habits and appreciation of real cooking in your kids, they may enjoy some junk food once awhile but will not indulge it as the main staple of their diet. They will see it as occasional treat.

    In dogs, all things must be balanced. Same with humans. But we have lost that sense of balance. We live in a world without history and identity, a world of excessive sexuality and extreme violence-mongering via rap and video games and dumb Hollywood movies.

    Kids’ cartoons are all about effects and effects with less space for storytelling. Everyone acts hyper.

    We are more than dogs, but we need to ask with the basic questions of what is good for life. Dogs and humans are both living organisms. Before they are anything else, they are forms of life, and some things are good for life while other things are not good for life.

    Dogs need real food, real love, real training, real time outdoors, etc.

    Humans need real food, real bonds, real memory, real identity, real values.

    But our 2 PCs — political correctness and pop culture — fill minds with shallow dogma and refined formulas that are inorganic. The idea of ‘gay marriage’ is inorganic. It is a made-up nonsense that no sane person would fall for. But we live in a world where our culture is dictated by advertising, TV shows, dumb movies, trashy music, and etc. It is no wonder everyone has no sense of values or identity to defend.

    We are living in the world of Glob, the globalist blob that just devours the bodies and souls of all the world.

    We need a life in balance. The film Koyannisqatsi warned of where we are heading.

    Capitalist economy can do wonders in production and distribution, but it turned us into zombies and pigs.

    1. Claran: Exactly. I was a welder. The jobs just went away. I am literate and self-educated, but I could not bear to sit at a desk in an office and fill out paperwork, so I work part time as a driver and spend my free time reading and making or fixing things in my garage. But not every discarded American can fill their time with intellectual activities or owns a house with a garage they can use as a workshop.
  30. there are tremendous differences between Canada and the United States which help explain the increased despondency of white Americans

    1. Canada is just 2% Black , and their Black population arrived mostly after 1920, thus they are not faced with daily reminders by our elite that Black lives matter and whites are to blame for their pathologies
    2. Britain is the number one source on immigrants into Canada, followed by the Chinese. Canada’s working class faces less competition from illegal immigrants from Latin America.

    3. NAFTA helped Canada more than America, and the Canadian economy has done better than the US mostly due to the shale oil boom.

    The differences between Canada and America are significant and help explain why American whites have it worse off than Canadian whites. It is clear that American working class whites are mocked by our elite, just as the elites swoon over Blacks and hispanics and blame whites for their problems. On top of the near constant attack on white culture, the elites have brought in millions of replacement workers to keep wages low while they destroy our culture, schools and neighborhoods via section 8 housing and other government programs designed to bring diversity and lower wages to white areas.

  31. Economic Sophisms says

    This was a great article Mr.Karlin. Outstanding work.

  32. If we take out suicides, is the white number worse than that of blacks and Hispanics?

    Also, middle age deaths could be higher among whites cuz more of them make it to middle age.

    We know lots of Negroes don’t make it to middle age cuz they end up dead young in gang violence.

    I know of a friend whose older brother committed suicide. He’d been messed up for a long time, largely due to drugs. He was living at home and then, one day, he killed himself via overdose of alcohol and tylenol. He was married and divorced.

    Maybe people who evolved in northern climes are more prone to depression. They needed to struggle to survive under such harsh conditions. Without such harsh conditions, there’s less to struggle against, and that fills their lives with boredom.

    Part of the reason for the rise in demise of white middle aged folks could be loss of economic fortunes, but maybe the other reason is that life isn’t all that bad. If life was much worse, maybe their survival instinct will kick into gear.
    Things are not good enough to make them happy but things are not desperate enough that they have to struggle to survive.

  33. One’s psychological health is related to expectations.

    Blacks and Browns are used to expecting less.

    Whites are used to expecting more. So, when expectations aren’t met, whites are prone to feeling more depressed and down. Also, they feel unrepresented. People want to feel like they are led. As bad as black leaders are, they make black people feel that they are led and their anger is heard. And there is some of this among browns too.

    But there is no leadership among whites. Poor whites just feel poor. Not only that but they are attacked all over in the media.

    In the South, it’s really bad cuz the Negroe are on the move, and there so many of them down there.

    Also, the demise of white identity is gonna hurt white folks.
    Identity can make a person feel worthy and rich even if poor. If an Irishman feels he is a proud Irish in his own land, at least he is an owner of his nation. Even if he is poor, he feels rich in owning his own nation, his culture, his heritage, his history. He may not have a big house or fancy car, but all the land he sees around him is his. It belongs to him and his people. And you can’t put a price tag on that. Would you rather be a poor person with a nation or a rich man with no nation?
    When Jews resettled in Israel, many of them had little but they felt rich cuz they regained the Holy Land that means so much to them.

    Such a feeling has been lost to white folks. Pop culture has wiped out white memory. Education teaches whites to hate themselves. And the encroachment of blacks and non-whites on white lands makes whites feel invaded and displaced. And white leaders don’t listen to whites. In Minnesota, the white governor tells white people that if they don’t like the Somali invasion, they(white masses)should move.

    True wealth is owning your own nation and history. After all, we live only for so long and everything we own will end up in the dump or pass to others. But if we own our nation, then even after we die, it will belong to our descendants, people with our blood running through their veins. And real pride rests in that, and that is why Jews insist on Israel remaining Jewish. And all proud men want their women to use their wombs to produce more of their children, not the children of men of other races.

    So many whites have lost their way cuz they lost the secret. “You and the Land are One.” The Grail is not some mystery far away but the truth right in front of your face that you’ve forgotten. It’s Occam’s Grail.
    In EXCALIBUR, the knights ride off to faraway and exotic places to find the Grail, but it was always there right in their hearts and minds. They’ve just forgotten it.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzLfJvHlQmo

    It’s in RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY. The goodness was always within him. He just forgot it, that’s all. We need more men like Steve Judd in that movie. He hasn’t much but he has his dignity and pride.

    https://youtu.be/K0oq7SubkLQ?t=1m48s

    White men have forgotten the basic truths of what gives life meaning. They forgotten about family, nation, ancestry, heritage, culture, arts, and stuff. They get their culture from youth degeneracy, Howard Stern, Jerry Springer, comic book movies, ugly heavy metal music, tattoos, piercing, and etc. It’s like in the documentary COUNTRY BOYS. Numbnutsiness took over. And Christianity cannot help these kids cuz it is now in forgiving and apologizing mode. Christianity must judge as well as forgive. And it should never apologize to people who aren’t worthy of apology since they will just exploit the good-will apology to get more and more for themselves. Never apologize to Jews and Negroes since they never accept the apology in good faith. They just squeeze it for more and more.
    Also, paradoxically, Christianity can be more corrupting cuz it promotes innocence. After all, it is easiest to corrupt the innocent. Children are so easy to corrupt. Why was the girl so easy to possess and corrupt in THE EXORCIST? She’s young.
    Because Christianity promotes the power of faith, it promotes innocence, and the innocent are easily corrupted. So, is it any surprise that Christian societies are so easy to corrupt? The best antidote to corruption is the critical mind, and this requires the promotion of engagement with philosophy and art and history. But there is little of this. Now, when I say philosophy, art, and history, I don’t mean elitist-snobby academics. Even lay folks can understand the basics of philosophy, ethics, art, and history. But even the basic understanding of such has fallen by the wayside with the implosion of Middlebrow culture in America. In this sense, Dwight MacDonald was wrong to see Middlebrow-ness or Tooey-ism(The Fountainhead) as the biggest enemy of culture. Thought it can be ‘stalinist’ and ‘stodgily petty bourgeois’ at the same time, it can serve as the moral-cultural bulwark of the masses against the cynical machinations of the Gail Wynands and the radical conceits of the Howard Roarks of the world.

    There is a dark and philistine side to tooeyism but it does stand for a kind of mass morality against both cutthroat capitalism and sneering elitism(of Roark who holds most of humanity in utter contempt). Tooey in Fountainhead abuses his power, but we need a spokesman for the common man. Of course, the ‘common man’ stuff can be abused by the powerful and cynical, as in MEET JOHN DOE. But without something of that sort, the common man is defenseless against even more dangerous forces.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swOxKu80JpU

    In a way, David Mamet is the new Ayn Rand though less blatantly ideological.
    Mamet and Rand’s view of society is similar. All this ‘common man’ morality stuff is just less-talented-gentiles invoking morality and justice to take from more intelligent people, especially the Jews whom the dimwit gentiles envy and resent.
    In STATE AND MAIN and GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS, there’s the gentile who gets all worked up about the ‘common man’ and social values. Ed Harris bitches about how the working man is exploited by the rich, but he just wants to be rich himself. And the moral troublemaker in STATE AND MAIN goes into moralist mode only because he lost his girl to some rich actor. But he changes his tune when he is paid off.

    Rand and Mamet, both Jewish, saw gentile morality as merely a crutch to take from Jews who were more adept at money-making and gaining elite power. Of course, there were many Jews who joined the socialist movement, but even such Jews were troubled by ‘common man’ talk. After all, such ‘common man’-ism in the USSR led to new ‘antisemitism’ that favored Slavs over smarter Jews. (Death of a Salesman turned out to be very wrong. Miller’s Zionist-Socialism that suggests that Jews should forget about business and instead work with hands as farmers and carpenters — honest work — wasn’t the key to Jewish power and success. Though Loman failed, it was Jewish success in business that led to the great power of Jews. In the play, we are told Loman was good with planting stuff and fixing stuff. He wasn’t meant to be no businessman. And Biff says he really feels at home outdoors doing physical labor. It’s as if neither was really cut out to be a businessman. But in fact, many Jews excelled at business and made tremendous fortunes. Sure, there were failures like Loman, and the play is right to say that there is no short cut to success. But physical labor was never gonna be the key to Jewish success. Jewish key to success was gonna be mind power in business and wheeling-dealing. Maybe Miller was intentionally fooling the audience. Maybe he wanted people to sympathize with the poor Jewish failure to hide the fact that so many Jews were actually succeeding beyond the wildest dreams. Make people sympathize with the Jewish failure to get their minds off the great Jewish successes that would soon take over America.) And Rand and Mamet were correct to some extent cuz mediocrities often invoke morality to get some more stuff. So, black leaders bitch about ‘social justice’. But they are just asking for a piece of the action for themselves. They are saying, ‘honkey, gimme some pie, and I’ll call off the angry Negroes.”

    Though THE FOUNTAINHEAD is ostensibly not about Jews, one can’t understand it without taking into account Rand’s Jewishness. Rand obviously identifies most with Wynand and Roark. Wynand is like a Jewish businessman who milks the masses by giving them what they want, which is mostly trash.
    He is a great businessman. He will sell junk and rake it all in. Jews were good at that. And Roark is like a determined Jewish intellectual, artist, or prophet. Jewish history has long been about the symbiotic alliance of the merchants and the prophets/rabbis. Both endeavors are defined by imagination, talent and genuine ability. Wynand may sell junk but he’s really inspired in what he does. Roark may be difficult to work with, but he is a man of genuine talent.
    Tooey, in contrast, has no special talent. But he as a bureaucratic mind. Like Stalin or Mayor Daley, he is good at organizing. Since he can’t win the respect of true entrepreneurs or true visionaries, he must look to molding philistine public opinion and morality to increase or keep his power. He is strictly middlebrow.

    Rand’s view was that Jews have genuine talent as businessmen and as thinkers/artists. But too many gentiles are mediocre, and in their envy and resentment, they drag out the crutch of morality to counter the power of money and vision.
    And Mamet feels much the same way. Even when the protagonists are clearly crooks and cheats, Mamet admires them for their intelligence at what they do. They have ability absent among most people. So, if people get fleeced by such con-artists and complain, it must be because they are weak and envious. They deserve to be fleeced. They lost not because they are good but because they are weak and/or dumb.

    It may well be human nature is like this. Maybe much of morality is just a game of envy, slave morality as Nietzsche called it. And indeed, some demagogues have used morality in a bad way by making people out to be helpless victims of big bad greedy people.

    BUT, Rand’s idolization of Wynand and Roark would be nuts in a real world setting cuz men of genuine talent can be total scum too. It is ridiculous to just admire them for their talent alone. Mamet’s naked and raw libertarianism is just Judeo-centrism gone bonkers. It really just says, “We Jews are superior and more intelligent, therefore, even when we fleece you, it’s in our right because we did it with brilliance, and if you complain and call for justice, you’re just an envious resentful goy shithead.”
    The logical conclusion of this mindset is THE WOLF OF WALL STREET where a bunch of nasty Jews feel justified in their wealth cuz they stole it ‘honestly’. They cheated but by outsmarting the dummies who exist to be outsmarted. It’s as if superior intelligence and cunning justifies anything. Just like lions deserve to devour the sheep, the smart deserve to leech off the dumb.
    This kind of view prevails too much in our world.

    So, the white gentile community needs a kind of Tooeyism to counter this. In the real world, the Wynands are far worse and more dangerous than in THE FOUNTAINHEAD. In the movie, the character was cynical but not without some degree of honor and dignity. A scum like Paul Singer or Sheldon Adelson or Koch Brothers have no decency of any kind. None.
    As for Howard Roark, no such person can ever exist in reality. He is fun as fantasy but nothing else. People like Roark in the real world are essentially narcissistic sociopaths. And such people have nothing but contempt for the masses.

    Now, the masses may be rather dumb and idiotic. But a true leader must never give up on his people and just see them as pigs at the trough. He must keep trying to inspire them and challenge them to be better than they are. Morality is a constant struggle, like trying to remain clean. Just like we shower regularly, we need constant moral cleaning. And by morality, I mean reality morality, not waving homo flag or weeping to the speechs of that lying gorillian mofo MLK.
    We should not let scummy Jews like Jerry Springer and Howard Stern and others to fill the eyes and ears of white masses with total trash and filth. Even masses of dumb-butts deserve more than that. And if these people are not led and inspired by leaders who care and seek the truth and the law, they will fall victim to the golden calf and debauchery, like in the TEN COMMANDMENTS.

    We need a middlebrow morality movement. And I don’t mean kumbaya garbage dished out by Oprah or FORREST DUMP. This movement must be outside the sphere of Jewish-controlled Hollywood and talk radio. Also, it must be more than about Christianity that promotes childlike innocence, mindless faith, goo-goo stuff, and simpleton-ism.
    It must be about real culture, real history, real identity, and real heritage.
    And it must be about race because the white race will not survive if it outsources its thinking to Jews and cucks out to ghastly Negroes.

  34. Some on the Right speak of ‘cultural marxism’.
    Maybe we need to speak of ‘cultural HIV’ or ‘cultural AIDS syndrome’, especially among whites.

    White civilization now seems to have lost its immunity to the Jewish virus, homo bacteria, and Negro inflammation. Having lost those protections, the West is falling prey to massive migration invasion since its defenses are broken.

    All individuals and societies need to have immunities and defenses. Without such, they will merely fall prey to influences and infections of others.

    These immunities must not be absolute. The human bodies need immunities to resist infections and germs, but if the human body resisted all germs, it would die since the human bodies needs some kinds of bacteria. Also, the presence of germs strengthens the immune system by putting it into practice. The human body must NOT resist everything.

    Ultra ‘xenophobia’ is harmful because a closed system keeps out even good and useful stuff. But when immune system totally breaks down, the society becomes xenophoric(xeno-euphoric) and becomes blind to the harmful stuff from the outside.
    An immune system must take in some stuff while keeping out other stuff. It must resist but not resist everything. Japan during Meiji Reform Era sought to take in modernization to strengthen Japan, but it fended off foreign political power. Japan was to be ruled by Japanese for Japanese interests.

    The greatest germ-threats to white folks are the Jewish virus, homo bacteria, and Negro inflammation. They can be deadly and lethal stuff.
    Most directly dangerous are the Negro germs because Negroes are so wantonly destructive, aggressive, wild, and nuts. The mere presence of Negroes is enough to turn a city into Detroit.
    Jewish virus is indirectly dangerous. Jews don’t pose a demographic threat in the West. Also, Jews are not individually violent or crazy-ass. Jews are dangerous because they aid the enemies of whites while lowering white defenses.

    It’s like this. If a white guy was with a black guy, he could be threatened by the Negro.
    But if a white guy were with just a Jewish guy, he couldn’t be much threatened by the Jew alone. A Jew cannot kick the white guy’s ass.
    But if the white guy were with a Negro and a Jew, the Jew could use the Negro to destroy the white guy by shaming the white guy into dropping his ‘hate’ and ‘fear’ of the Negro.
    Jews, nasty as they are, can’t do much damage to the West in a world without blacks or mass migration. If EU were made up only of Jews and whites, Jews might cheat whites and do some bad things, but they couldn’t destroy white civilization.
    But because there is mass migration of third world folks to the EU, Jews can do great damage by lowering white defenses against such invasion.
    So, blacks are directly dangerous, whereas Jews are indirectly dangerous. Suppose you’re a white guy in a room with a big Negro and a Jew. Suppose you hold a gun to the Negro and keep him at bay. But suppose the Jew keeps yapping and convinces you to give up your gun. Now, you’re toast cuz the stronger Negro can whup your ass. It is why Jews wanna take away your guns.
    Negro alone is enough to threaten you. A Jew alone isn’t enough to threaten you. But when there is Negro and Jew, the Jew can help the Negro while lowering your defenses.

    In a world without blacks and mass migration, Jews and homos could not destroy white civilization. They could degrade it, defile it, and make it ugly, but white world would remain white. But because there is the danger of mass invasion, such degradation of the white world leads to demoralization, and a demoralized people no longer know what to defend anymore. So, they fall to mass invasion by Muslims, Negroes, and others.

    Now, absolute immunity against Jews, Negroes, and homos isn’t good. After all, the body needs some germs, and even germs offer some good stuff. There have been many great Jewish scientists, writers, thinkers, and innovators in all fields. White society gained a tremendous deal by learning from Jews. And homos contributed much to arts and culture throughout history. And Negroes have contributed something crucial to music culture.
    This was why Nazi antisepticism was so limiting. By banning all Jews, it failed to tap into Jewish genius. By being so harshly anti-homo, it repressed lots of homo talent.

    But unless there is some kind of immunity/resistance at work against Jewish influence, homo decadence, and Negro nuttery, the white system will fall apart. If Jewish virus is allowed to run rampant, it will try to take over the entire system. If homo bacteria is allowed to spread, it will try to infect everything, and we are now into tranny stuff too cuz the homo insanity has gone nuts. If Negro inflammation goes untreated, the Negro will mess up every community and try to whup every white boy and bang every white girl who, infected with jungalo fever, will no longer have any conscious sense of obligation to use her womb to produce the whites for the posterity of the white race.
    There is something very pushy and nasty about Jewishness, something very jivey and funky-ass about Negro-ness, something so whoopy-pa-poo, vain, sneering, and vicious-delicious about homo-ness.

    The problem of White America is the immune system has completely broken down. White Folks have full-blown Cultural AIDS Syndrome. White Society is totally infected with Jewish virus, homo bacteria, and Negro germs. And they are raging wild and crazy. And they work in tandem.

    Can we still save the white patient. Is there a cure to this disease. Can white folks restore their immune system against the Jew, Negro, and homo?

  35. I worked there 60 years ago –one summer just out of high school. Temperatures of 115° F and asbestos and silicate laden air. With the ubiquitous cigarettes lungs were gone by age 60.
    Smoking is way down now; but maybe not in the subject cohort. Or maybe some of the new poisons are just as effective.

  36. Blacks continue to have higher fatality rates than whites, the question is why white Americans in this age group have reversed the trend of lower fatalities.

    While Blacks continue to have a higher fatality rate among this age group , the gap is closing because the fatality rate for blacks and hispanics is declining while the American white rate started to rise significantly after 1999.

    the economic situation for white Americans has been getting worse , caused by NAFTA, the decline of unions and massive immigration from which reduces wages. White Americans had in this demographic and their arenas became accustomed to a steadily increasing standard of living, and are having a difficult adjusting to the new economic realities combined with easy access to low cost opiates. A daily fix of heroin today is just $10 , less costly than drinking in a bar.

  37. Not sure what you’re talking about as NAFTA gutted Canadian manufacturing, particularly in Ontario. The collapse in the price of oil now leaves Canada in an awful situation since it doesn’t have heavy manufacturing to fall back on.

    The UK ranks 8th as a source of immigration to Canada in the year 2013 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Canada) behind the following:

    1. China
    2. India
    3. Philippines
    4. Pakistan
    5. USA
    6. Iran
    7. France
  38. things are changing in Canada, but the largest number of Immigrants living in Canada in 2011 were the British.

    looking at a single year, 2013 , is less important than looking at the total number of immigrants in Canada. Especially when we are comparing the years 1999 – 2015

    Canadian immigrant population by country of birth (2009)
    1. Britain – 580,000
    2. China – 466,000
    3. India – 443,000
    4. Philippines – 303,000
    5. Italy – 296,000
    6. USA -250,000
    7. Germany +France + Holland = 362,000

    still your chart helps identify the major differences between immigration in America and Canada. today. Americans immigrants are mostly from Latin America, and more likely to take jobs from working class whites. America also has much higher numbers of illegal immigrants than Canada. And we can thank the Mexican cartels for starting drug franchises across our nation which offers 24 hour deliver service in under 30 minutes.

    Latin Americans are less than 1% of the population of Canada verse 20% of the population of the United States. This is a dramatic difference While America has about the same number of Asians as Canada , we have been invaded by over the last 30 years.

  39. unpc downunder says

    Antidepressants generally aren’t as dangerous as painkillers or sleeping tablets and certainly not as addictive. You are also much less likely to suffer serious problems if you mix them with alcohol (which is why doctors are willing to prescribe them to the underclass). The main danger with SSRIs is if you mix them with powerful stimulants like meth and ecstacy and suffer serotonin syndrome.

    Antidepressants are hyped up by supporters and opponents, but in reality they are neither particularly dangerous or particularly effective. In my experience, and those of most people I’ve talked to, they have relatively mild side effects, but relatively mild positive benefits.

    You could make a good argument that they are over-prescribed, but some doctors claim the placebo effects from antidepressants are also very useful.

  40. Here is some good advice for anyone. Keep the fucking booze out of your body. Keep the dope out of your body. Both will make all your problems worse. Be a real fucking man and deal with difficulties as best you can without self-destruction.

    How obvious does this really have to be ?

  41. This has nothing to do with immigration and everything to do with American capitalism and society. A MAWAM who is fifty today graduated high school around 1983. The US still had industry at the time and racism ensured that the cream of the industrial jobs were reserved for MAWAMs. Life was looking good. No need for college.

    After the collapse of the USSR, the US capitalists saw no further need to keep industry in the US and to pay a decent wage. The US government saw no need to make them do so. The US deindustrialized. The good industrial jobs disappeared. As the good jobs got fewer, competition for them got fiercer. Not so much with hispanic immigrants as with American minorities, and so the MAWAM was no longer king of the hill. At the same time MAWAMs got older. More importantly their kids got older. And the society got harsher. Drugs became abundant in every little industrial town, as did zero tolerance, three strikes and you’re out, outrageous judicial fines, stupefying jail sentences and bone jarring aggressive policing. Ditto for debt, divorce and doctors bills.

    Not all things became more abundant. Job security got less so. Along with wages, disposable income and saving account balances. As a matter of fact saving accounts and pensions, like those cute quaint rotary phones are considered sooo 1980s in the US today.

    So now, in 2015, you have that 50 year old MAWAM: no savings, debt ridden, divorced, in poor health and whose kids have no propects and are having potentially ruinous run ins with the law over their daily weed intake.

    Its enough to drive anyone to booze, drugs or suicide. Or maybe just a plain vanilla heart attack.

    P.S. Latino is not a race!

  42. Antidepressants generally aren’t as dangerous as painkillers or sleeping tablets and certainly not as addictive.

    My point was mainly to counter the idea that Doctors in the UK aren’t trigger happy with the pills.

    In the urban areas and especially rust-belt areas they hand them out like candy because they know they are no other solutions.

  43. It has everything to do with immigration.

  44. Not as much as the deaths of 20 year olds, but yes. Firstly, some people do reproduce in middle age. And many of the rest help in the caretaking of younger relatives, even if indirectly. I have a friend whose wife just had their second child. He told me straight up that they probably wouldn’t have had the second kid if his mom was unable to help them financially.

  45. Latino is not a race but Mexican immigrants to the US are predominantly of predominantly Amerind stock. The white ones tend to stay in Mexico where they have it good. But if they come here they can still get in on the Diversity rent-seeking gravy train since most idiot Americans view anyone with a Spanish surname as “nonwhite.” White Hispanics really have it made in America because they get all the perks of being white but can still hide behind their “minority” status when that’s convenient. Why does that remind me of another group…?

  46. I, too, agree that this must have something to do with U.S. healthcare policy and the U.S. healthcare system, specifically, the rising consumption of opioids since the 1990s:

    “Since 1999, the amount of prescription painkillers prescribed and sold in the U.S. has nearly quadrupled, yet there has not been an overall change in the amount of pain that Americans report.”

    “The age-adjusted rate of prescription painkiller overdose deaths among non-Hispanic white persons increased 4.3 times, from 1.6 per 100,000 in 1999 to 6.8 per 100,000 in 2013.
    The rates more than doubled for non-Hispanic black persons, from 0.9 per 100,000 in 1999 to 2.5 per 100,000 in 2013.
    The rates increased only slightly for Hispanic persons, from 1.7 per 100,000 in 1999 to 2.1 per 100,000 in 2013”

    http://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/

    http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/dea-drug-overdoses-kill-more-americans-car-crashes-or-firearms

    http://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/data/overdose.html

  47. This http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/prevalence/any-mental-illness-ami-among-adults.shtml has reliable data on prevalence of mental illnesses among various demographics. Whites in 26-49 age group have a much higher mental illness rate. The only demographic worse than this is the Native American/Alaskan/Hawaiian/Pac. Islander. This may partly explain high mortality since mental illness can be a conduit to all the self-destructive behaviors discussed.

    One surprising data is the much larger rate of mental illness among females compared to males (more than 50% higher).

  48. You are talking about the Liverpool Care Pathway, I think. This is the UK’s euphemism for euthanasia. They give you opiods until you stop breathing, then they don’t resuscitate you. If I recall correctly, about half (a third? I don’t remember) of UK hospital deaths are due to euthanasia. I guess you could call this generous if, like, you had a dark sense of humor.

  49. WorkingClass says

    Well, we used to have industry and unions and white male privilege. We were providers and appreciated as providers. Our fathers were proud of their work and so were we. For a time our willingness to work was all we needed to prosper.

    Now a car costs more than a house cost then. And we have to compete with the third world for wages. Even if we still have a pay check its not going to make a house payment or send a kid to college. Now we are racists and oppressors. We are what’s the matter with Kansas. We have been dis-possessed and everybody hates us. We might as well go eat worms.

    It takes a while for formerly middle income people to learn how to be poor. But we will adjust. And when the time comes it will probably be us white guys who lead the revolution.

  50. I can’t agree enough. No matter how long one lives, it’s still a blink of an eye in historical terms. The only way to achieve a form of immortality is reproduction.

    Unfortunately, with the advent of contraception it is now possible to short circuit the sex drive by experiencing hormonal pleasure but not reproducing.

    The same kind of runaway instinct explains so much of the self harm in society; obesity, alcoholism or drug abuse, and empathy towards those unable or unwilling to reciprocate, due to the depletion of the pool of worthy recipients.

    The last phenomenon, which I call empathobesity or empathallergy, is even less in the public consciousness, but is the driver of huge social policy insanity in the West like the importation of millions of Muslims by Germany and Sweden, the destruction of public education in the USA to accommodate poor performance, the pervasive egalitarianism etc.

  51. Dude, you are way off regarding Canada. Just to start with over half of the UK immigrants to Canada are Black- think Lennox Lewis, and another significant % are South Asian. Cities like Toronto and Vancouver are White minority cities.

  52. Latvian woman says

    A more liberal use of anti-depressants during and after the Soviet collapse could’ve actually saved many men’s lives. It wasn’t really the custom to take sedative, anti-depressants and such in the Soviet culture (except for old ladies taking valerian root), and it was also considered kind of “unmanly”. However, it could’ve helped during the time of dismantling of mega factories and important social structures.

  53. epochehusserl says

    The United States of Disparate Impact

    I tried to pay my employees in gold but that was prohibited.

    I wanted to get a loan but the government said they didnt have any money because they had already given out too many bad loans to historically disadvantaged groups.

    I made more than the median income but I was not able to keep all that much because I live in the same house with the woman I sleep with and live as a family with our children together.

    I was going to help a woman and train her at my business because I thought she needed help but the AAUW said I have to pay her equal pay for equal work. I knew she wouldnt be able to pay her what the AAUW thought was equal right away at least until she was proficient but the AAUW and I couldnt agree on the definition of equal work so I didnt hire her.

    I was too costly to give my employees health insurance because of government mandates so I didnt do it.

    I ended up losing my business to my competitors because the government bailed them out and not me.
    My wife left me and I lost my life savings paying child support despite the fact that she cheated on me. I had to move back in with my parents.

    I met a young women on public transportation. I like dating her despite the fact that she had 3 kids by 3 different men before the age of 21. I think I am going to stay with her until she gets her 9k earned income credit check in February. I dont know if our relationship will last much longer than that, but her mom might be able to get me a job in the Obama Administration investigating companies that use IQ tests improperly. If they are caught they are subject to fines that go towards subsidizing bad loans for historically disadvantaged groups.

  54. In 1995 I visited family in Bremen, IN. Still a normal little Midwestern farming/industrial town – all white, quiet, peaceful.

    In 2000, I came back for the first time since 1995. The local capitan of industry had died and his sons had taken over the factory. They fired all the whites and replaced them with illegal Mexicans. The town was now full of taquerias and all the pathologies Mexicans bring, most especially drugs and rampant crime spread far out into the countryside and people were having to lick their doors for the first time ever (example – my uncle 10 miles out of town had lost a barn on his farm lost when Mexican criminals burned it down while stealing frozen beef from a cow he had slaughtered for personal food – also lost his plane and a tractor and combine). The remaining whites could be seen around town in a kind of fog or haze, like they could not believe what had happened. We ourselves could not believe anyone would do this to their town for a quick buck, but it was right before our eyes.

    Rinse, lather, repeat for thousands of towns and businesses across the US. With the co-opted white political and religious elites organizing the ostracizing of anyone who dissented the self destruction as a racist.