Julian Assange: The Goal is to Have Endless War
Julian Assange: The Goal is to have endless war:
Suicidal Class War
Is suicide a major casualty of American class war? Yascha Monk interviews Angus Eaton at Persuasion:
Yascha Mounk: . . . What helps to explain why it is that, for centuries, life expectancy went up in the United States and now, suddenly, we're seeing this really quite striking aberration from that?Angus Deaton: . . .We don't really know why life expectancy improved so much for so long. But if you go into that literature, it's amazingly diverse and controversial. Was it nutrition? Was it drugs? . . . A lot of what Anne [Case] and I have done is just to document this fact that there's three years in a row when overall life expectancy fell: you've obviously got what happened during COVID (which doesn't require a lot of explanation by itself) and also these horrible deaths of despair, which are suicides, drug overdoses, and alcoholism—a huge increase during the pandemic of deaths from alcoholism.
Suicides have always been a big clue in this story, because of Durkheim and the story that when society is really not working for people, that's when you begin to get suicides. Suicide is just an indicator that something is gone terribly wrong. But I think it’s getting almost no attention among policymakers and very little in the press that the increase in deaths during this period is almost entirely among people who don't have a four-year college degree. For the third of the popular adult population that has a four-year college degree, they're pretty much exempt from all these horrors. And in fact, if you look at life expectancy at age 25 for people with a college degree, it's like the best out of all the other rich countries in the world; it looks like Japan or Switzerland. What's pulling us all down—and making us, really, the sick man of all the rich countries—is this increasing mortality among, if you like, the working class, and I think that cuts across race. This is not a black–white issue, not a poor–rich issue, but an issue between people who have a college degree and people who don't.
There's something gone wrong with working class America. And it's not hard to list a bunch of things. Democracy is not working very well for them. The neoliberal consensus wasn't good for them. The share of profits in GDP is rising at the expense of working people. It's sort of like an old fashioned class war.
The Importance of Unstructured Play for Children
Our thesis is that a primary cause of the rise in mental disorders is a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam, and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults.
The Cost and Harms of Fentanyl
This is shocking: 5 grams of fentanyl is enough to produce 2500 doses and costs less than $1,000. Less than 50 cents per dose. This low production cost partly explains why so many markets are being flooded with fentanyl and so many lives are being ruined. I dug up this information after listening to a podcast by Leighton Woodhouse. In his introduction to the podcast, Woodhouse writes:
The public debate on how to address America’s street addiction crisis has centered on two competing approaches: the “harm reduction” strategy of keeping addicts safe as they continue to use, and the “recovery” model, which advocates mandated treatment to get addicts off of drugs altogether.
But there’s a dark reality that goes unacknowledged in that debate. With massive volumes of fentanyl and meth flooding into the country, neither approach can ever keep up with the pace at which the addiction crisis is growing.
The amount of highly addictive narcotics that are easily available to any American is so immense that supply now drives demand rather than the other way around. Fentanyl is mixed into every illegally distributed drug on the market, from street cannabis to meth to diverted prescription drugs.
Teenagers who think they’re buying Percocet on Snapchat end up dead or addicted to fentanyl. Kids are self-medicating for loneliness and depression with the most potent opioid on earth. As cities struggle to manage their existing populations of homeless drug users, new addicts are created every day.
We can never end the street addiction crisis until we cut off the trafficking of these substances into our country. But is that even possible?
US Advice to Diplomats: Communicate a Non-Ending Sense of Hopeless Conflict
Your government dollars at work. Stella Assange is the wife of Julian Assange. This bizarre directive from Neocon Anthony Blinken (one of the architects of the Iraq War) brings to mind US efforts to blow-up an early opportunity to settle the Ukraine-Russia dispute.
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