[PJ Media] Since 1998, people all over the world have been living healthier and living longer. But middle-aged, white non-Hispanics in the United States have been getting sicker and dying in greater numbers. The trend is being driven primarily by people with a high-school degree or less. That's the sobering takeaway from a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published this week. The study authors sum it up:
Between 1978 to 1998, the mortality rate for U.S. whites aged 45 to 54 fell by 2 percent per year on average, which matched the average rate of decline in the six countries shown, and the average over all other industrialized countries. After 1998, other rich countries' mortality rates continued to decline by 2 percent a year. In contrast, U.S. white non-Hispanic mortality rose by half a percent a year. No other rich country saw a similar turnaround.
That means "half a million people are dead who should not be dead," Angus Deaton, the 2015 Nobel laureate in economics and co-author of the paper, toldThe Washington Post. "About 40 times the Ebola stats. You're getting up there with HIV-AIDS."
#4
The trend is being driven primarily by people with a high-school degree or less.
Well then give everyone a high school degree..now let us break to converse on high speed rail, fried blue crab and pinot gregio. All in favor of adjournment say Aye.
#6
Women are dying at a much younger age now also. Dementia also is increasing. Successful women also haven't time for home life so they are increasing using call services. They dictate where to eat. What day and time and where to bed down for time they are available. Disease free and I am certain many other demands.
It is difficult to find anyone in the Obama administration who believes that putting up to 50 Special Operations soldiers on the ground in Syria will make much of a difference in the raging civil war there. And yet, the president has authorized this expansion of America’s military intervention for the same reasons that he has approved incremental escalations for the past year and a half. He believes he has to do something .
But what he is doing will not work. And in a few months, the United States will face the challenge again — back down or double down. So far, President Obama has responded each time with increased intervention.
In a smart piece for Foreign Policy, Micah Zenko provides a timeline of this escalation. He notes that “what began Aug. 8, 2014, with 25 airstrikes in the first week and food and water airdropped to save threatened Yazidis, has morphed and expanded into 600 bombs being dropped per week and more than 100 bundles of ammunition supplied to an unnamed faction of 5,000 Syrian rebels.” And this was before the Special Operations forces were sent to Syria.
And yet, the strength of the Islamic State does not appear to be much diminished, even by the administration’s account. This is hardly surprising. The Syrian struggle is complex and ferocious, with many outside powers — Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, now Russia — aiding many different groups, with supposed allies often at cross-purposes with each other. It’s difficult to see how a modest U.S. intervention would shift that landscape.
In 1967, the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who worked in the Kennedy administration, wrote, “In retrospect, Vietnam is a triumph of the politics of inadvertence. We have achieved our present entanglement, not after due and deliberate consideration, but through a series of small decisions.” The Vietnam analogy is crude and imperfect for many reasons. And yet the basic logic of America’s gradual intervention is hauntingly familiar. You opt for incrementalism, hoping to get lucky.
In the end, despite his inconsistencies and vacillations, I believe that Obama will keep the U.S. intervention in Syria small and limited. But he will leave his successor with a terrible dilemma in just the way that the Kennedy administration left Lyndon Johnson.
The next U.S. president will face the stark reality that America’s involvement in Syria will not have resolved matters. But the U.S. government will have made commitments, sent troops, spent billions and lost lives in that conflict. At that point, can the U.S. president back down or will he — or she — have to double down, hoping to get lucky?
#1
If you take into consideration that Obama's goal is not to actually win, in fact not to seriously hurt our enemies, but diminish American influence, his foreign policy makes perfect sense.
#2
It's the difference between primitive warfare and modern warfare. The pros prefer the latter, the pols prefer the former. You may have modern tech but you're just playing the old game of ritual displays seeking to intimidate your opponent.
#3
Does anyone here hoestly believe our Ebolama is doing any actual fighting against islamic porkoranimals? To put it even more bluntly, how can anyone think his actions (complete lack of real ones) are anything but treason?
You better folks could come up with a list longer than Dumbo's ear droop so I only mention only a couple here.
Giving the Iranian nuke and ICBM programs the complete green light. Iran will have working nukes shortly AND they will use them. Of that there can be no doubt.
Not to mention funding these fundimentalists with way over 150 billion $s to continue their global Jihad.
Refusing to arm the Kurds, allowing world banks to move the Islamic States oil funds the murder by neglect of our Vets and so on and so on.
Treason flat and simple, what say you folk?
Posted by: Mike Mann ||
11/08/2015 10:41 Comments ||
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#4
The South Side of Chicago is the perfect metaphor for "The 0bama Legacy"(TM).
The nuclear deal with Iran, reached this summer, was supposed to auger a new age in Iranian-American relations. Advocates of the deal spoke optimistically of Iran moderating, opening up for business, and generally becoming a more constructive force in the region than it has been in the past. The deal really wouldn’t make a lot of sense otherwise: Why would you want to funnel hundreds of billions of dollars to Iran — and put it on the threshold of nuclear weapons status within a decade — if it remains committed to, well, “Death to America”?
So how is the promise of the Iran deal panning out? Not so well as even the New York Times editorial board, fervent supporters of the agreement, is now forced to concede. In an editorial today, the Times editors write: “The anti-American backlash in Iran since the nuclear deal was signed has gotten so bad that one Iranian-American businessman in Tehran now likens it to a witch hunt. As alarming as that is, the crackdown will probably get worse.”
The Times conveniently blames this crackdown on the hardline Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is said to be at odds with the “moderate” president, Hassan Rouhani. But even the Times has to concede where ultimate responsibility lies: “Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is fueling the crackdown. He allowed the nuclear deal to proceed, but has since denounced the United States as Iran’s chief enemy and warned against what he says is America’s intention to infiltrate Iran and attack the country’s revolutionary roots.”
It won’t do to suggest that there is a power struggle going on between moderates like Rouhani and hardliners like Khamenei. However much Iran might like to pretend otherwise, it’s not a democracy. Rouhani only has as much power as the “supreme leader” — the voice of Allah on Earth — is willing to concede to him. Khamenei calls all the shots, and he has shown no sign of becoming a kinder and gentler ayatollah. If there is any doubt, he made it clear this week when he said at a celebration commemorating the 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy: “The slogan ‘death to America’ is backed by reason and wisdom.”
And while Rouhani may be exercised about the arrest of Iranian-Americans trying to do open up Iran to business, he has not said a peep to protest against Iran’s continuing power grab throughout the region or its testing of a ballistic missile that can carry a nuclear warhead. Far from moderating its support for terrorism in the wake of the deal, Tehran has upped its backing for the murderous regime of Bashar Assad. There are now said to be thousands of Iranian troops fighting alongside Iranian proxies such as Hezbollah to keep Assad in power. A number of senior Revolutionary Guard officers have been killed in Syria.
The Times editorial resolutely refused to draw any implications from these alarming trends. That’s because the implication is unpalatable for supporters of the Iran deal. Recent events suggest that Iran is not in the process of fundamentally altering its anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Israeli orientation. But soon, it will have a lot more resources available to carry out its dangerous agenda.
#1
lots more IRGC men will come back dead or wounded from syria and iraq
what will Khamenei do then
Posted by: lord garth ||
11/08/2015 2:33 Comments ||
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#2
It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say: --
"Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away."
Dear Sweet Mother of God and All Her Wacky Nephews. How many people will have to die before we finally admit that 'moderate' simply means 'slightly less homicidal'???
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
11/08/2015 11:48 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.