If you are not happy with the results below please do another search
Trying to reduce opioid deaths in construction fields by taking the masculinity out of them could make matters worse, not better.
The headline that the Providence Journal gave to a Washington Post story, “Fueled by drug crisis, US life expectancy declines for a second straight year,” hides the key point:
Overall, life expectancy dropped by a tenth of a year, from 78.7 to 78.6. It fell two-tenths of a year for men, who have much higher overdose death rates, from 76.3 to 76.1 years. Women’s life expectancy held steady at 81.1 years.
American women now have five full years of additional life, on average, than American men. You better believe that if the sexes were reversed that would be not only the headline, but a theme for national coverage everywhere for a week.
Looking at a leading cause of the change only amplifies the point:
Men of all ages (26 deaths per 100,000) are twice as likely to die of a drug overdose as women (13 per 100,000).
In Rhode Island, where female Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo hosts an annual student contest that discriminates against boys, the number of overdose deaths among men is almost three times that of women:
The most important antidote to drug use and overdose isn’t a government program, it’s hope. Unfortunately, that’s only a word on our flag in Rhode Island.
OXON HILL, Md.—The crisis at the southern border is both unending and unrelenting. As The Daily Signal previously reported, more than 1 million migrants have been encountered at the southern border since the start of fiscal year 2023 on Oct. 1. Rep. Mark Green, R-Tenn., chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, recently traveled with […]
President Joe Biden does not understand the threat China poses to America, according to Sen. Rick Scott. “He pacifies [Chinese President Xi Jinping] all the time,” Scott, R-Fla., says of Biden’s relationship with the leader of the Chinese Communist Party. “China and Russia pose a threat to American freedom, Scott says, because “both of them […]
Whether it’s a family or a single male, the drug cartels play a role in every illegal crossing into the U.S. at the southern border, former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott says. “They’re either directly paying the cartels or the cartels are controlling their movements for another benefit, meaning to systematically overwhelm Border Patrol, create […]
Rhode Island is receiving another tranche of federal funding to help expand mental health services for youth in the state’s public school system.
Fentanyl is 50 times stronger than heroin. How strong is that? It’s so strong that it only takes 2 milligrams—the equivalent of four grains of salt—to kill you, according to a former federal drug enforcement agent. Put another way, he says, 1 gram of fentanyl could potentially kill 500 people. “We got to make sure […]
In fiscal year 2022, Customs and Border Protection seized more than 14,000 pounds of fentanyl. The lethal opioid drug has become a leading cause of death in adults ages 18-45. “The fentanyl seizures continue to increase, each fiscal year, and we know that of those seizures, we’re probably only apprehending 5% to 10% of the […]
A group of U.S. House Republicans on Tuesday called for the impeachment of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Why is there so much division in America, and how is our society breaking down? R.R. Reno, editor of First Things and author of “Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West,” joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss the obligations of the elites, marijuana, and the future of religion […]
In this Saturday edition of “The Daily Signal Podcast,” Mary Theroux discusses her work to relieve the plight of the homeless in San Francisco by attempting to heal issues in their lives that led them to this condition. Theroux is board chairman and CEO of the Independent Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Oakland, […]
Remake RI DOH Despite claims of her ‘resignation’, the more likely January firing of Nicole Alexander-Scott as Director of the RI Department of Health (RI DOH), quickly followed by the departure of her top capo, Thomas McCarthy, presents a major opportunity for Governor McKee to remake the crumbling health organization, which completely missed the target […]
Although the bureaucratic experts who continue to suppress our lives (and the journalists who enable them) might believe differently, numbers showing that compliance rules had little, if any, effect on the pandemic aren’t some interesting abstract datapoints on a page.
Eight months into the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown, let’s examine the goal of the lockdown, the critical matter of its effectiveness and the collateral damage it has caused.
Graph by epidemiologist Dr. Andrew Bostom basis State of R.I. data
At her press conference currently ongoing, Governor Gina Raimondo is announcing new restrictions, including reduction from fifteen to ten at social gatherings; no spectators at any sports for next two weeks; and fines, including fines on households, saying she doesn’t want cases to “explode”.
You’d reasonably conclude from these serious measures and language that Rhode Island’s case positivity rate, the newest panic-promoting selling point of the lockdown, was at a recent high, wouldn’t you? In fact, as epidemiologist Dr. Andrew Bostom said yesterday on the R.I. Center for Freedom and Prosperity‘s “Mikes with Mics” and shows in his graph, above, the current, very modest rise in case positivity is actually lower than the modest rise of August 1.
What does perhaps the most important COVID-19 data point show and say about the case for continuing Rhode Island’s lockdown?
As Ed Achorn reminds us, the Constitution is only as strong as the people’s willingness to enforce it, and too many Rhode Islanders apparently believe our founding document can be waived if they’re scared or can claim that lives will be saved.
Across all of the various measures, COVID-19 is on the decline in Rhode Island, reminding us that the next question is what our thresholds for faster reopening should be.
The positive trends continue. All that can really be said is that my simplistic model seems to expect that things would be improving a little more quickly than they are, but that’s a good problem to have.
As COVID-19 numbers in Rhode Island continue to improve, we should note that those at risk from the disease are different from those at risk from an economic shutdown and realize that we may have made a terrible mistake in our response.
Various bits of news are making the case that government COVID-19 statistics are now inflating the numbers, but even so, today’s report for RI has some good news.
WPRI Channel 12’s Eli Sherman and Walt Buteau reported on April 17 that 80% of COVID-19 deaths in Rhode Island have occurred in nursing homes. (All deaths from a pandemic are awful but somehow a nursing home setting is especially horrifying both because of the vulnerability of the residents and the perception, normally correct, that nursing homes are safe places.)
This disturbing pattern continues with the most recent COVID mortalities announced by the state yesterday: 10 of 13 were nursing home residents.
If we’ve found the steady rate of COVID-19 infections for our current level of lockdowns, that would point to the differences in models as well as the need to figure out what government is supposed to be for.
If models projecting the hospitalizations and deaths in Rhode Island from COVID-19 keep being revised down, they’ll start to get into the range at which deaths from our response are a larger number.
Here’s a clip from WPRI’s coverage of Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo’s latest daily COVID-19 statement that shows an absolutely unacceptable attitude from the governor:
Asked about the latest projections from the University of Washington — which now predict nearly 1,000 Rhode Islanders will die due to COVID-19 and the outbreak will peak in the state later this month — Raimondo said the school’s model has been updated after conferring with Rhode Island officials. She again declined to share the state’s own predictive modeling, but indicated she thinks the peak could be as late as mid-May.
“If anyone tells you they know exactly when Rhode Island’s peak is, and what the number of hospitalizations will be at that peak, they’re not being honest with you,” she said.
The governor is making decisions that have profound effects on our lives, including the exercise of direct executive authority to do things that would not normally be permitted in a representative democracy. She has an obligation to explain herself to the public. “Take my word for it; I’m the boss, and I have the best of intentions” is not good enough. (That’s a characterization, not a quotation, if you weren’t sure.)
How many deaths does the governor project Rhode Island will experience, and how many does she expect to avert by taking this or that action? These aren’t idle questions from a Don’t Tread on Me enthusiast. Every new restriction on our activity comes with a price-tag in health and lives. In rough numbers, Rhode Island experiences just under 400 suicides and drug overdoses each year; how much is poverty, isolation, and idleness going to drive up those numbers? Does the governor have a model for that?
Tough-gal talk about driving around the state and “you’re not going to want to be in that group” if she has to “break up any crowds” is (maybe) how you manipulate teenagers, not how you communicate with adults. Declaring a slow-rolling state of emergency for months on end does not make us subjects, and the governor’s legitimacy requires complete transparency so we can evaluate for ourselves whether her actions are justified.
Of course, it doesn’t help that our legislators are proving that they lack the courage to fulfill their role in our government during this tricky time.
The well intentioned but hasty, ill formed Opioid Stewardship Act passed by Rhode Island lawmakers last session is now creating medication shortages and chaos within our healthcare community instead of properly addressing the problem.
The opioid epidemic is a widespread, complicated problem, and only a collective effort will begin to solve it. The healthcare community and lawmakers need to work in tandem to find policies that effectively lessen opioid abuse while still keeping our state’s economic health as well the health and safety of the patient in mind. It’s unfortunate, however, that Senate Bill S0798, the Opioid Stewardship Act, fails on both accounts.
Expanding rights and liberties is an important goal, but we can’t pursue it without taking due consideration of the ground on which our society finds itself.
On the surface, this looks like a great thing:
New data show younger couples are approaching relationships very differently from baby boomers, who married young, divorced, remarried and so on. Generation X and especially millennials are being pickier about who they marry, tying the knot at older ages when education, careers and finances are on track. The result is a U.S. divorce rate that dropped 18 percent from 2008 to 2016, according to an analysis by University of Maryland sociology professor Philip Cohen.
The problem is that the improving divorce rate results from a shrinking denominator:
Many poorer and less educated Americans are opting not to marry at all. They’re living together, and often raising kids together, without tying the knot. And studies have shown these cohabiting relationships are less stable than they used to be.
The article leaves no way to know the ultimate result, but it could be that more couples in a marriage-like situation, including with children, are separating. They just aren’t filling out all the paperwork their elders did, and children are the ones who’ll suffer.
As I’ve been arguing for years, marriage was an institution in which responsible couples invested their expectations for the benefit of less-responsible couples. Our society brushed that responsibility aside, and we’re seeing the results all around us (public turmoil, suicides, opioid overdoses, inequality, and so on). What the lower divorce rate indicates, therefore, may be that those “poorer and less educated Americans” have learned an unfortunate lesson from those who have more resources.
Unfortunately, having fewer resources makes it more difficult to deal with the consequences.
The Cranston Herald has run a post of mine defining the flawed thinking in our society’s current approach to boys’ being boys:
The crisis we’re now facing is that our feminized society forecloses many of those channels. Boys with too much energy are drugged in schools. Sports that seem aggressive have come under fire, and we’re now several generations into the Title IX project to require bean-counting equality in the number of sports on college campuses.
A kid who wants to turn his boyish frustration into an intellectual pursuit and the heroism of curing some disease or something might find that – sorry, pal – the mission of the moment is promoting women in STEM. Democrat Governor Gina Raimondo has an annual “Governor for a Day” writing contest from which Rhode Island boys are excluded.
Most of all, far too many homes have no father to provide the subtle example that boys need to follow. We see the result in school shootings, but also in suicides and drug overdoses, all of which disproportionately involve boys and men.