Schlockmeister

Image by Mayday Productions.

As I was telling somebody with reference to the death of Jeffrey Epstein and the immediate batches of conspiracy theories arising around it, I can't stand it when real life starts resembling this schlocky kind of fiction. I'm contented to believe Epstein was ready to die and succeeded because of the ineptness and negligence of his guards, as explained by a couple of members of the fraternity on NBC:

Former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who resigned his post in May, wrote in a tweet that people who face charges similar to Epstein's are often at a high risk of suicide and that several defendants released on bail in cases in Maryland, where Rosenstein was formerly U.S. attorney, died of suicide.

"Stopping people from harming themselves is difficult," he said.

Jack Donson, a former longtime federal Bureau of Prisons case manager, told NBC News that suicide watch in federal lockup "usually only lasts a few days to week" due to the amount of manpower the 24-hour surveillance entails.

"It requires staff to do overtime shifts" and is "not considered a good use of resources," Donson said. 

It's one of many things they're really bad at https://t.co/D3EU6fXFpY

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) August 10, 2019

And I don't even care. If anybody thought they were going to silence him, it seems likely they were wrong:

Spreading Derangement

Calling Dr. Laing! Image from Wikimedia Commons via IRETA.

The good news coming from last week's attempted murder by USPS package delivery of everybody Trump denounces in his rallies, from George Soros through Hillary Clinton to Maxine Waters, and the actual gun murders of Vickie Lee Jones, 67, and Maurice E. Stallard, 69, in a Kroger's where the gunman looking for black people to kill resorted after he was frustrated in his efforts to shoot up the nearby First Baptist Church of Jeffersontown, Kentucky, and of the 11 congregants of the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, I can't name them all but their memory is a blessing...

The good news, I was saying, for David Brooks ("The New Cold War"), is that we don't have to worry so much about racism or anti-Semitism or guns or the president's poisonous language, or any other problems that a community might set about trying to solve in a practical effort:

These mass killings are about many things — guns, demagogy, etc. — but they are also about social isolation and the spreading derangement of the American mind.

Killing sprees are just one manifestation of the fact that millions of Americans find themselves isolated and alone. But there are other manifestations of this isolation, which involve far more carnage.

The bad news is that that violence is nothing compared to self-murder, quickly by gun or slowly by hypodermic, and as far as I would know the numbers he offers are correct:

This demographic will self-destruct in five seconds...

Image by Julian Sancton for Esquire, February 2011.

A few weeks ago it struck me as a funny idea to think of the Trump electorate as 1990s teenage MTV nihilists Beavis and Butt-Head, grown to middle age, by way of some kind of political or postpolitical headbanging, heh-heh-heh, but then I started hearing about this paper by Anne Case and Angus Deaton detailing an ongoing crisis in the health of undereducated white American men between, say, 30 and 64, of just staggering proportions, comparable to the AIDS crisis back then, in which these guys are dying, apparently, of anomie, chronic joint pain and sciatica, and financial worry, shooting themselves, overdosing (on pills or alcohol), or systematically destroying their livers.

That means, quoting from the summary by Paul Campos,

Between 1998 and 2013, all-cause mortality for white non-Hispanic Americans (WNHAs) rose from 382 to 415 per 100,000. For WNHAs with a BA degree or more it declined from 235/100K to 178/100K. For WNHAs with some college but no BA it went from 291/100K to 287/100K.

For WNHAs with a high school degree or less, mortality rose from 601/100K to 735/100K — a 22.3% increase in mortality, in an overall social context in which mortality rates for almost all other groups are dropping by an average of around 2% per year.

For WNHAs with no college education, the annual suicide rate rose from from 22 to 39 per 100K, deaths from liver cirrhosis rose from 27 to 39 per 100K, and overdose deaths rose an astonishing 314%, from 14 to 58 per 100,000 per year. All told, middle-aged WNHAs with high school degrees or less experienced 135 more deaths per 100,000 per year in 2013 than in 1998. 

At a time when death rates for almost everybody in the world, with exceptions like Syria, perhaps, are falling.

Dim Sum of Despair

Updated March 30:

Welcome back David Brooks!

Wisdom can be turned into suffering -- @nytdavidbrooks today
— Kathryn Jean Lopez (@kathrynlopez) December 6, 2013

Wait wait, is Kathyrn Jean being kind of witty here, or transgressively ironic? Risking an inversion of the kind of tiresome and morally obnoxious cliché you'd expect her to be using, about suffering turning into wisdom: as in that's why God gives people, say, stomach cancer, so they can achieve wisdom, impressing friends and family in their last months with the depth of their understanding and serenity. Is she turning it around for some blackly comical purpose? Is she, God help us, doing a Shorter David Brooks?

Hundred-corner shrimp balls. Via The Gourmet Project.