Suicide Rates and Methods Among the Middle Aged

According to a Johns Hopkins study, hanging/suffocation is increasing in popularity as a method of suicide.  In particular, among the age 45-59 demographic, hanging/suffocation increased by 104% between 2000 and 2010.

I note this because, if you want an indication of economic conditions, that would be a red flag.  Suicide is being used by the white middle-class, middle-age people who see the world they knew evaporating.  These are not drug-addled losers or the lonely, terminally-ill elderly.

I found this line especially shocking:

"Suicide recently exceeded motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of injury death in the U.S.; this report is the first to examine changes in the method of suicide, particularly by demographics such as age," said lead study author Susan P. Baker, MPH, a professor with and founding director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Injury Research and Policy, part of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "While suicide by firearm remains the predominant method in the U.S., the increase in hanging and suffocation particularly in middle-aged adults warrants immediate attention." (emphasis added by me)

That is simply astounding.  Not automotive accidents, not murder, not accidental drug overdoses -- people are killing themselves.  The study also indicates that:  "Suicide rates are increasing faster for women than for men, and faster in whites than in non-whites." 

I'm not sure why hanging is becoming a more popular method.  I suppose one is less likely to wake the spouse, the kids, or the neighbors.  Perhaps it has something to do with the sense of failure or guilt, i.e., an appropriate "punishment".  I do know of two fairly recent incidents in a town in the St. Louis area where the people chose hanging.  One was a pastor accused of child molestation; the other was a teenager who skateboarded with a young relative of my family.  

Suicides rates increased in the middle-age group while those 70 and older were less likely to commit suicide.  Those in the 60-69 age group saw an 85% increase in the use of poison as a method, and I would venture to guess that is mostly overdosing on prescription drugs.  

To any who might be considering suicide, I offer the following as free advice worth probably about as much as you pay for it.

I am prone to depression myself, and I know how easy it is to look around and say, "I have no reason to live.  I would be better off dead."  I know very well the feeling of not being able to handle any more, being pushed to physical, mental, and emotional limits.  I have been there.  I also know it is quite possible to rationalize the harm done to those around us by our choice to commit suicide.  At least, we won't be "hurting" family members or loved ones any more, right? 

Life is more than possessions.  It is more than success or failure by worldly standards.  One does not need to be a believer in God and an after-life, as I am, to place a higher value on who we are than on what we have. 

You are here.

Make the most of it.  We are going to need you in the days and months and years ahead.  I believe each of us is born into the time and place and situation that will shape us and form us for our destiny.  Sometimes that is growing into something; a lot of times it means pruning and grinding off the excess, taking away something.  It is not necessarily a good idea to fight that process.  Let it run its course.

It probably varies from one individual to another.  For me, the worst is thinking that I brought it on myself, that I deserve the situation I am in.  For another it may be false accusations, irrational blame, being forced to suffer as an innocent.  I am not going to tell you it will get better.  It may not.  It may get worse.  I can tell you that you will get through it if you keep going.  If you are a believer, pray.  If you are not, meditate.

There are medications that can help, but there are also medications that can cause problems.  Consider that the cause of your mental state could be chemical.  I suspect that is case with many of the middle-aged who are killing themselves.  Way too many of us are relying on "better living through chemistry". 

Go talk to a doctor.  

Get eight hours of sleep for a couple of nights.  It will work an amazing change in your brain. 

During the holiday season, be thankful.  It's like Thanksgiving.  Do it.  It helps.  Find something that you can lock onto for which you can still be grateful.  A relationship.  Jesus, who will never leave us or forsake us no matter how damn stupid we are.  When I am mad at everything else, at least there is coffee.  Whatever works. 

If you want me to pray for you, I will.  Hang on.

Time for a Hog Boilin'?

We noted this back in August, via Barnhardt.

I had an earlier post from May, 2011, via Denninger.

And now there's this from the National Seniors Council:  Obama Begins Push for New National Retirement System --

A recent hearing sponsored by the Treasury and Labor Departments marked the beginning of the Obama Administration’s effort to nationalize the nation’s pension system and to eliminate private retirement accounts including IRA’s and 401k plans, NSC is warning.
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Deputy Treasury Secretary J. Mark Iwry, who presided over the hearing, is a long-time critic of 401k plans because he believes they benefit the rich.

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"This effort ultimately is designed to grab the retirement nest eggs of America’s senior citizens. This new government annuity scheme, even if it is at first optional, will turn into a giant effort to redistribute the wealth of America’s older citizens," explains Crone. "This scheme mirrors what I expect the President will try to do with Social Security. He wants to turn that program into a welfare program, too."

 Maybe they benefit the people who saved their money and didn't buy $150 jeans or $300 sneakers. 

We knew this was coming because Social Security and especially Medicare are not sustainable.  Instead of doing the smart thing and encouraging younger people to invest and save, they will just steal from those who have acted prudently.  This probably goes nowhere, but given the re-election of the HKB*, who knows.



* Half-Kenyan Bastard, and, note, I am not a "birther".   

Thinking of Investing in Popcorn Futures

The Obama regime is probably planning on swapping out Barack for Michelle at the end of this term.  They might be looking for a way to have the 22^nd Amendment thrown out by a packed Supreme Court.  Or, they might let Barack run as Michelle’s Vice President by having the Court rule on the interaction between the 22^nd Amendment and the 12^th Amendment, i.e., service versus election.  By 2016 there will be a solid and entrenched fascist majority of judges that will not be removed any time soon.  The left is practically orgasmic over all this.  That’s the bad news.

There’s worse news.  Initial claims came in at well over 400,000 this week, due, according to the spin, to Hurricane Sandy.  The core CPI is running 2%, but food inflation is, as Denninger notes, double that.  Retailers are expressing caution.  The euro bounced off the floor after the Fed Open Market Committee announced more money printing, but it should have soared against the dollar.  The fact that it did not indicates that the situation in the EU is deteriorating.  The EU has dropped back into a “double-dip” recession.  I would not be surprised to see a similar admission regarding the U.S. economy.  My opinion is that we have never gotten out of the recession from 2007.  The government has papered over it with irresponsible deficit spending and bogus numbers.  Still, sooner or later, the politicians will have to face the reality.  I’m sure the problem will turn out to be rich people not paying their fair share.

So is there any good news?  It’s hard to say.  A serious economic collapse could derail the left’s happy train to Utopia Junction.  Those familiar with the situation in Europe, e.g., the Frogman, doubt the libertarian scenario of impending economic doom, in that places like France have kept the socialist plates spinning for eighty years.  They may be right.  Nevertheless, one wonders how much of that “success” has been due to the vast, voracious, seemingly bottomless consumer economy in the United States.  Our appetite for stuff helped to subsidize the world, especially Western Europe and Japan, after the end of World War II.  Our ability to produce an over-abundance of food and other agricultural products helped millions afford more than adequate meals with money left over to spend or invest.

This is what I can’t help wondering, if you choke back American productivity with taxes and inflation and bureaucratic regulation, won’t there be a ripple effect?  I’m pretty sure it worked the other way – our productivity and somewhat-free market prosperity rippled out to prosper people in other countries to the point that they could “afford” socialism.  Thatcher’s famous line that “you run out of other people’s money” remains true, but the pool of “other people” was expanded with globalization.  The European and American parasite class has been supported, of late, by outright slave labor or the next thing to it in China and India.  The Chinese government, in particular, skimmed the profits for selling cheap goods and bought bonds to fund the increasing Western deficits which, in turn, filtered back to China via exports.  Thus the consumer bubble continued to expand.  For the last thirty-plus years the expansion has been increasingly a function of the growth of government debt.  We rode a demographic wave of population expansion into the eighties and a wave of productivity expansion into the 1990s.  Now it’s over and we are depending on the expansion of credit and a flood of immigrants to save us. 

I really question how that is going to work out.  I still think the credit default swaps that are exposed to a collapse and exit of Greece from the euro-zone are a lynchpin that dumps the load, perhaps domino-fashion, toward Spain, Italy, and Portugal.  I also think that Bernanke and the Fed have a little better grasp of reality than Krugman and the rest of Keynesian Greek Chorus.  Printing is ultimately as much of a damper on real economic growth as taxes and redistribution.  Inflation in a zero-interest-rate environment is destructive to capital while forcing people, especially older people, to spend less and try to save more.  As our population ages, more of us will try to “grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.” 

See how well that’s worked for Japan?  How long has the Nikkei been stagnant?  And that’s without a 15% unemployment problem. 

I still think we are going to crash.  I do not know when.  Certainly the parasite never intends to suck its host dry.  But, if you get a critical mass of deluded bloodsuckers, that’s what is going to happen.  The political and financial class will try to keep us back from the edge of open rebellion, try to keep us just mollified enough that we let ourselves be boiled.  Ah, there is the problem.  Someday we will be boiled, and, when that happens, after the bones have been picked clean, who is going to pay for your Tomahawk missiles, the fuel to run your drones, the wine and beer, the Kools and Twinkies to placate your voter class?  

The coyote caught the roadrunner.  Now what?  Or, maybe, the awesomeness of reality. 

Signposts on the Road to the Future?

Things are going well in Greece -- at least with supposedly racially-motivated attacks on non-Greeks.  I can't really trust the media reports on this.  I suspect there is more to it than simple "right-wing" nationalism or racism.  The government debt crisis, high unemployment, and worsening economic conditions are bound to change the outlook people have.  

We look at Greece and say that the nation has been living off Germany and the northern tier of the EU.  But how much of that is due to immigrants moving in and attaching themselves like ticks to the system?  We know there is a large contingent of parasitic immigrants in France -- mostly Muslims.  Perhaps that is also the case in Greece, and some people are waking up to it in the face of compulsory austerity measures.

Europe has encouraged immigration because of the below-replacement-level birthrate.  You have to have someone to pick up the garbage, trim your shrubs, and program your computers.  Along with the workers came the parasites, and many of the workers have figured out how to play the system to get more benefits like low-cost housing and free medical care. 

As long as there are freebies for all, everybody gets along, but when the arithmetically-inevitable crunch comes, it is a different story. 

America is not that far behind. 

A Case of Mistaken Identity

The polls were right.  Akin lost decisively, though, as predicted, Romney did win Missouri's electoral votes. 

I guess I mistook this country for the one in which I grew up.  

I refused to watch the coverage or listen to the radio.  I checked the internet a couple of times.  My wife came out to announce that Ohio was lost.  I suppose Virginia, Florida, and Colorado also went blue again -- I neither know nor care.  Either the angry white men didn't show up, or they are so severely outnumbered by government dependents and the slut contingent that it didn't matter.

Reality is still reality even when the majority deny it.  As Mal said, "May have been the losing side.  Still not convinced it was the wrong one."

It seems that most of the people in this country think that they can change arithmetic.  It has never happened, and it won't happen any time soon.  When the takers outnumber the producers, you end up with disaster.  You can run a deficit for a while, just like you can run up a bar tab and get all-mighty drunk with a dollar in your pocket.  The trouble is somebody is going to get stuck with the bill at the end of the binge.

I had no confidence that the can would not be kicked no matter who won yesterday.  Politicians will do what is politically sensible -- which has nothing to do with what is real, let alone what is right.   Europe has been doing it for 60 years with significant assistance from us.  Japan has done well selling us stuff, now China, but we are done.  The deficit is going to keep climbing.  The dollar is going down the drain -- though the euro may well go down first.  China's economy is going into recession.  The Middle East is going to starve then explode.  Israel is going to be under siege and, outside of Divine intervention, wiped off the map. 

It may not happen tomorrow, but the die is cast. 

For me, I am no longer a law-abiding citizen.  If you will allow me one more Malcolm Reynolds quote, "I aim to misbehave."  It is the State that is the outlaw.  I neither ask nor require anything of it.  I will continue to do what is moral and right.  If "legal" happens to coincide with that, I'll be happy and so will the parasites.  When it does not, I guess we'll see what happens. 

Fiocchi .22WMR Ammunition Review

There are probably three people in the known universe that give a hoot about this, but since I am one of them, and it's my blog, here it is.  I talked about my Marlin bolt-action .22WMR a while back, and I have been looking for stuff to feed it, especially now that fall is here.  Ammunition is just ridiculous these days and .22 mag is no exception -- ten or eleven bucks for a box of fifty seems like a lot to me.  I ran across some reviews of Fiocchi ammo that sounded pretty positive.  Midway has the solid jacketed version for sale at $8.09 for fifty or $77.99 for case of 500 (prices subject to change, as we all know).    

Since I like living on the edge, I bought 500.  They arrived, along with some other items, quite promptly last week, and I managed to squeeze in a couple of test sessions a few days ago and yesterday.  I am impressed.

This low-priced ammunition is accurate in my Marlin.  I put three shots into an inch square at 100 yards from a sitting position.  The point of impact is a little above the POI of CCI hollowpoint 40-grains, so I'm guessing the 1900 fps might be just a shade understated, or the bullet shape could be a little more conducive to maintaining velocity.  Either way, the Fiocchis shoot and function well above expectations.

Though Fiocchi is headquartered in my area, I have no affiliation with them, nor do I have any relationship with Midway other than being a long-time customer.  These are great Missouri-based companies that I am very happy to promote and encourage.  Obviously I can't speak for all of Fiocchi's products, but I certainly will not hesitate to try this brand in other variations and calibers. 

Why the Polls Could Be Surprisingly Wrong

I don't know who is going to prevail in the presidential race on 11/6, but I think a lot of pollsters will be surprised as well.  I think there are a couple of factors that will affect the outcome and that are skewing the numbers -- men, especially white males, and Independents.

First, I think males are more heavily committed to voting in this election than normal, so I think the pollsters are over-counting women as a percentage of likely voters.  I think we could well see the Michael Douglas "Falling Down" meme of "angry white men" come back strongly in this cycle.  I have never actually seen that movie.  The reason I recall it is because one of my younger colleagues went to see it.  He told me about it the next day and said that Douglas' character reminded him of me.   I think he meant that in a positive way.  We were good friends.

Another factor is party affiliation.  I believe that many Republicans -- myself included -- have become very disillusioned with the traditional, east-coast, establishment Republican Party.  We do not like big-government politicians whatever their party brand.  Many more of us than ever before have divorced ourselves from the GOP and now call ourselves Independents given that the Libertarian Party has been clueless about winning elections despite sentiment in their favor for forty years.

You may skip this brief tirade after 0 seconds:  We see too many people using social conservatism as a cover for more government intervention and an excuse to be fiscally irresponsible (yes, Governor Huckabee, I am looking at you).  We are sick of pointless interventions in foreign countries.  If somebody gives us trouble, by all means, go in and kill them.  Then get the hell out.  Stop wasting American lives and resources trying to fix nations that have been broken for centuries.  It's not our job.  Try closing the borders instead.  Thank you.  Now back to our regular BS.

What this means is that when you see Independents going overwhelmingly for Romney, you are really seeing conservatives, libertarians, classical liberals -- whatever you want to call us -- rallying, not for Romney but against Obama.

I suspect that party identification is very fluid and possibly misleading.  Are people, especially white males, abandoning both parties to self-label as Independents or are Independents mostly just disgruntled Republicans?  The answer to that question could be the key to the results a week from tomorrow.  I read a good example of what I'm thinking about this morning.  Last Friday, the internals of Rasmussen's national poll showed Romney winning Independents by a whopping 23 points.  Today, Romney is up only 8 points among Independents, giving him a slim 49-47 advantage over Obama.  That really makes no sense at all.  I have to conclude that the word "independent" may not mean what we think it means.  

Here's one thing I know.  Romney is going to carry Missouri easily.  St. Louis City and Jackson County will be the only points of blue on the Missouri map.  I think Romney even carries Boone County where the University of Missouri -- our sole out-state bastion of liberal lunacy -- is located.  Missourians can no longer vote a straight party ticket, so vote-splitting is the norm.  We will probably -- unfortunately -- retain our "conservative" Democrat governor.  However, I am going to go out on a limb and call the Senate race for Akin in a squeaker. 

Akin will not carry Boone County, but he will actually outperform Talent's 2006 numbers across the Ozarks region.  It was McCaskill cutting into Talent's support in the heart of Republican territory that made her the deciding vote for Obamacare in the Senate.  Talent was a lousy candidate, and Akin is possibly worse, but it is McCaskill's record she has to run against rather than Akin's mouth.