Month: April 2024

I want to highlight something I posted yesterday that might have gotten lost:

Up through 2014, teen suicide among girls was no different from suicide among adult women. Then, in 2015, it suddenly shot up, opening up a huge gap in only three years.

This is very unusual. Very often, when you see a sudden, sharp spike like this it means it's an artifact of some kind. That is, it's due to changes in record keeping or police reports or something like that, rather than an actual rise. I wonder if that's the case here?

I'm not aware of any kind of change in the collection of suicide statistics, or any change in how deaths are ruled a suicide. Still, this represents a 26% rise in the raw suicide rate over 36 months. That's a little hard to explain.

I was thinking some more about yesterday's comment that Joe Biden had given Israel 95% of what it wanted. So what's the other 5%? It's certainly not any kind of concrete support, which Biden has never even momentarily withheld. It's mostly just some occasional mild requests. In the approximate order he made them, here they are:

Maybe think about not immediately going into full bloodthirsty savage mode?

Maybe think about allowing some food in?

Maybe think about giving just a tiny shit about civilian casualties?

Maybe think about telling your religious fanatics in the West Bank not to casually murder people?

Maybe think about telling your coalition partners not to publicly muse about resettlement and genocide?

Maybe think about not killing humanitarian aid workers?

Maybe think about not starting World War III with Iran?

And I'd add: Maybe think about showing just a smidgen of gratitude toward a guy who's taken huge political risks to provide you with unquestioning support?

Not so unreasonable, wouldn't you agree?

Politico reports:

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle aired outrage Thursday after a POLITICO report that the Chinese embassy lobbied members of Congress on legislation that would force the sale of TikTok by its Beijing-based parent company.

Let me get this straight. Members of Congress are allegedly outraged because Chinese diplomats told them in private exactly the same things they've been saying in public for months? Do I have this right?

I got my bone scan a couple of days ago and the results were back in a couple of hours. Would you like to see them?

Impression: Evidence for abnormal activities in the spine ribs and pelvis and questionably long bones. A PSMA PET scan is recommended for correlation

Findings: There is suspicious increased radiotracer activity in the skull multiple thoracolumbar vertebral bodies multiple right and left ribs pelvis and questionable long bones.

Foci of mild activity is seen in both knees both ankles and both shoulders in a pattern most consistent with degenerative joint disease. The kidneys, bladder, and soft tissue are unremarkable.

My take is that this means the prostate cancer has probably spread to my bones, but I'm not sure. My doctor will tell me next Tuesday.

Also, my knees, ankles, and shoulders are slowly disintegrating due to old age, just like everyone else, which I already knew. My hips too, which the scan oddly didn't pick up. It's possible that the hip pain I've had for the past year is actually due to the cancer spreading into the thoracolumbar vertebrae, as noted above.

In case you're curious, first quarter GDP will be released next week, which means we're close enough that the GDPnow forecast from the Atlanta Fed is probably pretty accurate. Here it is:

Not bad. If this pans out it would be slightly down from 3.4% in the fourth quarter of 2023.

In the past few months I have gotten an:

• MRI
• Ultrasound
• CT scan
• Full-body bone scan
• PET scan (in a few weeks)

This will mean I've been scanned by:

• Radio waves
• High-frequency sound
• X-rays
• Gamma rays
• Positrons (though really just gamma rays again)

That's a lot of things to be scanned by. Are there any I've missed?

Charlie Cooke has good words for Speaker Mike Johnson:

“I’d like to praise Speaker Johnson,” Charlie says, “who, I think last night . . . effectively said at a press conference that he was done catering to the fringe, that he was not going to spend his time worrying about one or two members using the power they negotiated to oust him...... And that if he was kicked out as a result of this, so be it.”

That's fine. Johnson has been holding up aid to Ukraine for months, but he's finally come around. So even if he's late to the party, good for him.

Still, this would mean more if it weren't coming from the side that has relentlessly bashed President Biden as a pusillanimous weakling for giving Israel only 95% of what it wants in Gaza instead of 100%. That's a helluva lot more than Johnson has given to Ukraine.

Have you been keeping track of the brutal civil war in Sudan? No? Here are the basics:

• Central government vs. paramilitary group. Check.
• Millions forced to flee their homes. Check.
• On the brink of mass famine. Check.
• Atrocities by both sides. Check.
• Woefully insufficient aid from the US and the rest of the West. Check.
• Tens of thousands slaughtered. Check.
• Ceasefire desperately needed. Check.
• Just the latest in a long history of conflict. Check.
• Country was originally under British rule, gained independence shortly after World War II. Check.

Sound familiar? Oh wait. There's one more thing:

• Jews vs Muslims? No.

So no one cares. I imagine most college students could barely find Sudan on a map,¹ let alone figure out which side they ought to support if they cared.² I mean, probably both sides have some legitimate grievances, right? Just like every other conflict in the world except for Israel vs. Palestine, where everything is pristine and clear with no room for doubt about who the warmongers are.

¹About a thousand miles due south of Gaza, to put it in terms everyone can understand.

²In fairness, neither can I. As near as I can tell, it's a battle between two guys who were allies until a year ago, but who now both think they should be the boss instead of the other guy. There's a lot of detail behind this, but not a whole lot more nuance.

I just ran across someone remarking on the suicide crisis among teen girls and it immediately struck me as wrong. Didn't I just recently say that the suicide rate had grown about as much for both adults and teens?

Yes, but it turns out that's mainly because of men, whose suicide numbers are far higher than women and swamp the data. If you pull out women separately it looks like this:

Among women, the suicide rate has indeed gone up far more among teens than adults.

But note that the basic trend is still the same even when you look at men and women separately: the rise in suicide rates starts in 2007 and ends in 2017:

Among the youngest women, the sky-high annual growth rate from 1999-2017 suddenly slows to almost nothing after 2017.

What happened specifically from 2007-17 to cause this? Maybe nothing. The data is spiky, and it's possible the peaks and valleys don't mean much. For example, here's what I get by making slight changes to four data points:

Maybe the "real" underlying rate has been rising pretty smoothly from 2003 to now.

I don't know. The number of teen suicides among girls is about 500-1000 per year, which is bit too large of a sample size to think the data is noisy just by chance. Still, the absolute numbers that create the peaks and valleys are pretty small: around 50-70 deaths. It's not hard to argue that we shouldn't make too much of this.

If this sounds a bit muddled, it's because I kept looking at different views of the data while I was writing it. One thing that's clear, though, is that we've been on an upswing in suicides for the past two decades, and an especially large upswing among teen girls, who suddenly opened up a big gap from adult women in the three-year period from 2015-17. Feel free to speculate.

Sunset over Dana Point.