Important Takeaways:
- The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) monitors’ mental health and substance abuse through the Youth Mental Health Survey, a poll of high school students collected as questionnaires every two years since 2011. The most recent data, from 2021, was stunning: 42% “experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness,” up from 28% in 2011. And 22% “seriously considered attempting suicide,” up from 16% in 2011. While the 2021 data might reflect some of the most difficult months of the pandemic, the trends were apparent before 2021.
- Historically, youth have had low rates of suicide mortality, but that began changing about a decade ago. Today, youth and young adults (ages 10-24) account for 15% of all suicides, an increase of 52.2% since 2000. Suicide has become the second-leading cause of death for this age group, accounting for 7,126 deaths. The highest rates are found among non-Hispanic American Indian or Alaska Native youth, with a suicide rate three times greater than the general population. Youth who identified as sexual minorities (LGBTQ+) had a fivefold higher rate of attempting suicide.
- Substance use disorder
- Addiction is not a new problem in America, but it has become a crisis largely because of its new lethality. The advent of powerful opiates, especially fentanyl, has driven mortality rates to unprecedented levels. The CDC reported 105,452 drug overdose deaths for 2022, more than a fivefold increase from 2002 and double the number from 2015. The highest death rates are in males ages 35-44. For context, there were roughly 43,000 auto fatalities in 2022. Lung and bronchial cancers, which cause the most deaths of any form of cancer, accounted for 127,070 deaths in 2022, mostly people over age 50.
- The crisis is indeed personal, not political. There are, in fact, only two kinds of families in America: families struggling with a mental illness and those not struggling with a mental illness yet. The prevalence is that high—50% of us will be affected at some point.
- Anxiety and depression have become a new public health threat for Americans of all ages, but we have the tools to resolve this crisis through better engagement, quality care, and a focus on people and recovery
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Important Takeaways:
- A24’s chilling ‘Civil War’ trailer sees America tearing itself apart
- …director Alex Garland examines an America tearing itself apart in Civil War, and honestly, the trailer feels deeply uncomfortable to watch.
- A24 dropped a chilling first look at the upcoming film which sees a “near-future” U.S. descending into brutal conflict. We’re introduced to Nick Offerman as the president overseeing a dominant U.S. military suppressing state by state. He’s accused of using air strikes against his own citizens, while armed forces take over the streets of New York and Washington DC. Then, the Lincoln Memorial is blown up. It’s a grim picture.
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Important Takeaways:
- Russia Says Risk of Nuclear, Chemical, Biological War Increasing, Blames America
- The United States’ foreign policy is wrecking global security, bankrupting Europe, and risks the outbreak of nuclear war, Russia said in a series of finger-pointing statements while failing to address its own role in the same
- Russian Security Council Nikolai Patrushev said the deterioration of global security is the “natural consequence [of]… irresponsible” U.S. foreign policy. Referring to Israel, the Russian politician accused America of exacerbating conflicts and more broadly accused the United States of “stimulating the growth of common threats and challenges, including terrorism, drug trafficking, and transnational organized crime”.
- Patrushev went on to say, per Russia’s state news service that: “The risk of using nuclear, chemical and biological weapons is increasing.” The U.S. bears special culpability in the risk of biological threats, he said, because America has been engaged in “dangerous biological experiments” in Ukraine.
- Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who confirmed the rant was an official statement of the Kremlin.
- Russia’s remarks on Wednesday amount to a degree of saber-rattling and finger pointing, but come just days after Russia withdrew from the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), and months after it suspended the ‘New START’ (reduction of strategic offensive arms) treaty. The United States decried the latest move as an irresponsible “significant step in the wrong direction” which sets back confidence in international arms control.
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Important Takeaways:
- America is tired of Joe and Hunter Biden ‘weaponizing addiction’ as a get-out-of-jail-free card
- People have been sympathetic and indulgent toward Hunter Biden all his life — and maybe that’s part of his problem.
- But at 53, it’s time to grow up.
- Hunter’s self-pitying op-ed in USA Today was ridiculous.
- “What troubles me is the demonization of addiction, of human frailty, using me as its avatar and the devastating consequences it has for the millions struggling with addiction, desperate for a way out and being bombarded by the denigrating and near-constant coverage of me and my addiction on Fox News … and in the New York Post,” he wrote.
- But our coverage is of corruption, not addiction.
- It worked for Joe in the final debate of the 2020 election when he responded to pointed questions from Donald Trump about the millions Hunter had vacuumed up from China.
- He claimed Hunter’s abandoned laptop, which he knew very well was Hunter’s, was a “Russian plant” and “a bunch of garbage” and cited the Dirty 51 letter penned by 51 former intelligence officials that he knew was cooked up by senior adviser, now hapless Secretary of State, Antony Blinken.
- He feigned ignorance of the Chinese deals he helped Hunter secure, saying, “My son has not made money in terms of this thing about, what are you talking about, China.”
- Really? The Big Guy was slated to take 10% of just one Chinese deal Hunter had with Chinese Communist Party-linked energy company CEFC, and Joe met Tony Bobulinski twice in LA to vet him as CEO of the joint venture between the Bidens and China.
- Hunter’s first China deal came a few days after VP Joe flew with him on Air Force Two to Beijing and shook hands with his partner. Please.
- But the icing on the cake was the addiction defense. Joe looked directly at the camera and told the folks at home: “My son, like a lot of people at home, had a drug problem. He’s overtaking it. He’s fixed it. He’s worked on it. And I’m proud of him.”
- The appeal looks even more cynical today as evidence of corruption keeps piling up.
- Comer last week released bank documents showing that $40,000 “in laundered Chinese money landed in Joe Biden’s bank account in the form of a personal check” from his brother Jim Biden.
- Comer says that once he gets the latest tranche of bank records, he will issue two dozen subpoenas for Biden family members and associates: “It’s going to be a big week.
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Important Takeaways:
- Iran’s chilling threat to America over Israel: Islamic regime says the US will be ‘hit hard’ if no Gaza ceasefire is implemented – after Tehran-backed Hezbollah terrorists warned of escalation on Lebanon border
- Mohammad-Reza Ashtiani, Iran’s Minister of Defense, emphasized the urgency, stating: ‘Our advice to the Americans is to immediately halt the war in Gaza and implement a ceasefire, otherwise they will be hit hard.’
- But Mr. Blinken rejected a ceasefire, insisting it would only give Iranian-backed Hamas a chance to regroup following its horrific attack on Israel.
- Instead Mr. Blinken pressed for ‘pauses’ in the fighting to allow civilians to evacuate from the battleground of Gaza City and the northern part of the enclave
- The uncompromising tone was echoed by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who pledged at an air force base: ‘There will be no ceasefire without the return of our hostages, we say this to both our enemies and our friends. We will continue until we beat them.’
- Yemeni proxy, the Houthis, have already been sending missiles towards Israel, intercepted by Israel, the US and Saudi Arabia.
- Meanwhile, on Israel’s borders, attacks from its proxies in Syria and Lebanon continue to ramp up, with action also seen from its militia in Iraq.
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Important Takeaways:
- FBI Director Wray warns terror threat to Americans at ‘whole other level’ amid Hamas-Israel conflict
- FBI Director Christopher Wray on Tuesday warned
- “The reality is that the terrorism threat has been elevated throughout 2023, but the ongoing war in the Middle East has raised the threat of an attack against Americans in the United States to a whole other level,” Wray told lawmakers on the Senate Homeland Security Committee.
- “We assess that the actions of Hamas and its allies will serve as an inspiration, the likes of which we haven’t seen since ISIS launched its so-called caliphate several years ago,” Wray said. “In just the past few weeks, multiple foreign terrorist organizations have called for attacks against Americans and the West.”
- Wray warned that the most immediate concern is that individuals or small groups will draw inspiration from the events to attack Americans, including homegrown violent extremists who are inspired by foreign terrorist organizations, or by domestic violent extremists who are targeting Muslim or Jewish targets.
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Important Takeaways:
- Our Response to China Must Be Overwhelming, Not ‘Proportional’
- Biden meeting Xi at this time would be a mistake…. Anything Beijing wants cannot, by definition, be good for America.
- How, exactly, can Biden “stabilize relations” with a militant regime that has declared America to be its enemy?
- Worse, China’s regime thinks it is already at war with the U.S.
- Now, therefore, is the time to use all the resources of the federal government. The Secretary of the Treasury, for instance, can designate, pursuant to Section 311 of the USA PATRIOT Act, Chinese banks to be of “primary money laundering concern.” Designated banks can no longer clear dollar transactions through New York, where every dollar transaction clears.
- Such designations would put the large state banks out of business everywhere outside China. If large state banks were to fail, so would China’s state-dominated banking system. The failure of the banking system would undoubtedly mean the end of the Chinese economy and financial system. The end of the political system would soon follow.
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Important Takeaways:
- The survey asked people if they have a “great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in a long list of prominent institutions, and these were the results…
- Small business: 65 percent
- The military: 60 percent
- The police: 43 percent
- The medical system: 34 percent
- The church or organized religion: 32 percent
- The U.S. Supreme Court: 27 percent
- Banks: 26 percent
- The public schools: 26 percent
- The presidency: 26 percent
- Large technology companies: 26 percent
- Organized labor: 25 percent
- Newspapers: 18 percent
- The criminal justice system: 17 percent
- Television news: 14 percent
- Big business: 14 percent
- Congress: 8 percent
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Important Takeaways:
- HOW AMERICA GOT MEAN
- I was recently talking with a restaurant owner who said that he has to eject a customer from his restaurant for rude or cruel behavior once a week—something that never used to happen. A head nurse at a hospital told me that many on her staff are leaving the profession because patients have become so abusive. At the far extreme of meanness, hate crimes rose in 2020 to their highest level in 12 years. Murder rates have been surging, at least until recently. Same with gun sales. Social trust is plummeting.
- For roughly 150 years after the founding, Americans were obsessed with moral education. In 1788, Noah Webster wrote, “The virtues of men are of more consequence to society than their abilities; and for this reason, the heart should be cultivated with more assiduity than the head.” The progressive philosopher John Dewey wrote in 1909 that schools teach morality “every moment of the day, five days a week.”
- As late as 1951, a commission organized by the National Education Association, one of the main teachers’ unions, stated that “an unremitting concern for moral and spiritual values continues to be a top priority for education.”
- School textbooks such as McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers not only taught students how to read and write; they taught etiquette, and featured stories designed to illustrate right and wrong behavior
- A culture invested in shaping character helped make people resilient by giving them ideals to cling to when times got hard.
- Schools began to abandon moral formation in the 1940s and ’50s, as the education historian B. Edward McClellan chronicles in Moral Education in America : “By the 1960s deliberate moral education was in full-scale retreat” as educators “paid more attention to the SAT scores of their students, and middle-class parents scrambled to find schools that would give their children the best chances to qualify for elite colleges and universities.”
- The Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith and a team of researchers asked young adults across the country in 2008 about their moral lives. One of their findings was that the interviewees had not given the subject of morality much thought. “I’ve never had to make a decision about what’s right and what’s wrong,” one young adult told the researchers. “My teachers avoid controversies like that like the plague,” many teenagers said.
- The moral instincts that Smith observed in his sample fell into the pattern that the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre called “emotivism”: Whatever feels good to me is moral. “I would probably do what would make me happy” in any given situation, one of the interviewees declared. “Because it’s me in the long run.” As another put it
- A culture that leaves people morally naked and alone leaves them without the skills to be decent to one another. Social trust falls partly because more people are untrustworthy. That creates crowds of what psychologists call “vulnerable narcissists.”
- Luke Bretherton, a theologian at Duke Divinity School, told me. The result is the kind of sadness I see in the people around me. Young adults I know are spiraling, leaving school, moving from one mental-health facility to another.
- Suicide rates have increased by more than 30 percent since 2000, according to the CDC.
- If you put people in a moral vacuum, they will seek to fill it with the closest thing at hand. Over the past several years, people have sought to fill the moral vacuum with politics and tribalism. American society has become hyper-politicized.
- The Manichaean tribalism of politics appears to give people a sense of belonging. For many years, America seemed to be awash in a culture of hyper-individualism. But these days, people are quick to identify themselves by their group: Republican, Democrat, evangelical, person of color, LGBTQ, southerner, patriot, progressive, conservative. People who feel isolated and under threat flee to totalizing identities.
- Politics appears to give people a sense of righteousness: A person’s moral stature is based not on their conduct, but on their location on the political spectrum. You don’t have to be good; you just have to be liberal—or you just have to be conservative. The stronger a group’s claim to victim status, the more virtuous it is assumed to be, and the more secure its members can feel about their own innocence.
- This is not politics as it is normally understood. In psychically healthy societies, people fight over the politics of distribution: How high should taxes be? How much money should go to social programs for the poor and the elderly? We’ve shifted focus from the politics of redistribution to the politics of recognition. Political movements are fueled by resentment
- The politics of recognition has not produced a happy society. When asked by the General Social Survey to rate their happiness level, 20 percent of Americans in 2022 rated it at the lowest level—only 8 percent did the same in 1990.
- Healthy moral ecologies don’t just happen. They have to be seeded and tended.
- Mandatory social-skills courses. Murdoch’s character-building formula roots us in the simple act of paying attention: Do I attend to you well? It also emphasizes that character is formed and displayed as we treat others considerately. This requires not just a good heart, but good social skills: how to listen well. How to disagree with respect. How to ask for and offer forgiveness. How to patiently cultivate a friendship. How to sit with someone who is grieving or depressed. How to be a good conversationalist.
- These are some of the most important skills a person can have. And yet somehow, we don’t teach them.
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Mathew 24:12 And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold.
Important Takeaways:
- The US sets a grim milestone with a new record for the deadliest six months of mass killings
- From Jan. 1 to June 30, the nation endured 28 mass killings, all but one of which involved guns. The death toll rose just about every week, a constant cycle of violence and grief.
- Six months. 181 days. 28 mass killings. 140 victims. One country.
- A mass killing is defined as an occurrence when four or more people are slain, not including the assailant, within a 24-hour period. A database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University tracks this large-scale violence dating back to 2006.
- The 2023 milestone beat the previous record of 27 mass killings, which was only set in the second half of 2022. James Alan Fox, a criminology professor at Northeastern University, never imagined records like this when he began overseeing the database about five years ago.
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