Free Republic

Rising drug and alcohol overdoses, suicides, and disease from chronic alcoholism — labeled “deaths of despair” by one expert — are cutting the lives of white Americans short by nearly a half a year on average. Increases in these types of deaths among whites means that life expectancy for whites is not increasing as fast as it is for other groups, according to a government report that offers an unusual look at how different threats are affecting U.S. lifespans. “Things are moving in the wrong direction,” said Anne Case, a Princeton University researcher, of what she calls “deaths of despair.”...

U.S. hiring slowed to a near-standstill in May, sowing doubts about the economy’s health and complicating the Federal Reserve’s efforts to raise interest rates. While unemployment slid from 5 percent to 4.7 percent, the lowest since November 2007, the rate fell for a troubling reason: Nearly a half-million jobless Americans stopped looking for work and so were no longer counted as unemployed. Employers added just 38,000 jobs in May, the fewest in over five years. Less-educated workers bore the brunt of the hiring slump, with a quarter-million high school dropouts losing their jobs in May. That has perpetuated a long-term...

BERLIN, June 2 (UPI) -- Turkey recalled its ambassador in Berlin after German lawmakers approved a resolution declaring the World War I mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks a genocide. Ambassador Huseyin Avni Karslioglu is expected to travel back to Turkey on Thursday, after the German Parliament declared the 1915-16 killings of some 1.5 million Armenians a deliberate act of ethnic cleansing. Germany's ambassador to Turkey has also been summoned. The move comes just hours after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned of "repercussions" from the vote. The German resolution is considered a touchy one for long-term relations between...

The German parliament has passed a symbolic resolution recognizing the 1915 massacre of Armenians by Ottoman forces as a "genocide." The resolution was passed with a "striking majority" said President of the German Bundestag Norbert Lammert, with only one politician voting against it and one abstaining. Between 600,000 and 1.5 million Armenians, and other minorities, are estimated to have been killed by what was then-Ottoman Turkey during World War One. ... Germany's resolution is likely to place a strain on relations between Berlin and Ankara, and follows a recent migrant deal between Turkey and the European Union, in which Germany...

German lawmakers' planned vote to recognize the massacre of Armenians by Ottoman forces as genocide, will test the "friendship" between Berlin and Ankara, Turkey said Thursday, according to AFP. The resolution "will amount to a real test of the friendship" between the two nations, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said. "Some nations that we consider friends, when they are experiencing trouble in domestic policy attempt to divert attention from it," he said at a meeting of his Justice and Development Party (AKP). "This resolution is an example of that." He stopped short of threatening Germany with political and economic retaliation,...

This town in northern Iraq was home to more than 88,000 civilians in 2013. Today, there are none left living here. As The Daily Signal’s foreign correspondent, I visited Sinjar, where more than 5,000 civilians died at the hands of the Islamic State, the terrorist army also known as ISIS. This is my video report. The background: ISIS took over the town in August 2014. Most civilians fled, becoming refugees. ISIS militants rounded up those who remained, systematically murdering Yazidis, Christians, and Shiite Muslims in what the United States has called a genocide. The ages of the dead ranged from...

While Donald Trump has called on the GOP to become a “worker’s party”— a development Sen. Jeff Sessions called for two years ago, ironically, in the pages of the National Review— French has defended the idea that white working-class communities “deserve to die.” Specifically, French wrote a piece in support of Kevin D. Williamson, who had said: The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories...

“The cause is in my will.”—Julius Caesar, Act II, Scene II We ought to have known it would come to this. Still, the latest assertion of presidential authority assumes a new and ominous form: the power not merely to assert authority outside the law—which can at least masquerade under the banner of Lockean prerogative—but rather to redefine words and, with them, the institution of law itself. Such is what happened when Vanita Gupta, the head of the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, issued a menacing letter to Republican Governor Pat McCrory of North Carolina, ordering him...

The head of Bangladesh’s largest Islamist party was executed early Wednesday for his role in acts of genocide and war crimes during the country’s independence war against Pakistan in 1971, a senior government official said. Home Minister Asaduzzaman Khan said Motiur Rahman Nizami, the 73-year-old leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, was hung at 12:10 a.m. Wednesday inside Dhaka central jail amid tight security. […] Nizami is the fifth senior official from opposition parties to be executed since 2013 for war crimes carried out during the 1971 war. Three other senior members of Nizami’s Jamaat-e-Islami party and a top leader of...

We are entering a mass extinction that threatens humanity's existence, researchers have declared. Researchers say a new study shows 'without any significant doubt' that we are entering the sixth great mass extinction on earth. The study says that the window for conserving threatened species is rapidly closing. The study shows without any significant doubt that we are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event,' said Paul Ehrlich, the Bing Professor of Population Studies in biology and a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment who led the research.The new study, published in the journal Science Advances,...

The world population may grow larger than previously estimated, reaching 11 billion people by century's end, according to a UN-led analysis published Thursday. That would mean two billion more people on Earth than expected by 2100, largely due to high birth rates in Africa, said the report in the US journal Science. "The consensus over the past 20 years or so was that world population, which is currently around seven billion, would go up to nine billion and level off or probably decline," said co-author Adrian Raftery, professor of statistics and of sociology at the University of Washington.

“Africa’s projected to have more people than China or India by mid-century. More than China and India combined by the end of the century. And this is one of the causal factors that must be addressed.” At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week, Al Gore participated in a forum on “climate change” and how it affects the economy, and vice versa. In response to a question about whether he was happy to see increased willingness to act on global warming, Gore offered a rambling response that included the above eye-popper. Gore, like many other warmers, and in...

Sunday, January 22, 2012 The greatest threat facing mankind is... The greatest threat facing mankind is NOT anthropogenic "climate change." Nor is it anthropogenic environmental damage. It most certainly is not "overpopulation." Neither is it "peak oil." Nor is it food shortages. The greatest threat facing mankind is, however, "anthropogenic." Because the greatest threat facing mankind is the general failure of mankind to reproduce: Fewer tells a monumental human story, largely ignored, but which promises to starkly change the human condition in the years to come. Never before have birth and fertility rates fallen so far, so fast, so low,...

Leading Population Researcher: There Is A 90% Chance Of “Collapse Of Global Civilization” (Ehrlich) Mac Slavo October 25th, 2011 Paul Ralph Ehrlich, biologist and professor of population studies at Stanford University, has been warning for decades (The Population Bomb, 1968) that the earth is becoming increasingly unstable and incapable of supporting our ever expanding population growth. With 7 billion people on the planet and growth estimated to continue at a pace that would reach 15 billion by the end of the 21st century, Ehrlich notes that our concerns about feeding the world’s population and meeting energy resource needs for future...

Perhaps one of the most persistent and pervasive myths that have shaped the thinking of many people and, subsequently, public policy is the myth that the world’s population is spiraling out of control and that it will ultimately lead to catastrophic shortages of the essential resources necessary to sustain life. This whole concept of “overpopulation” can be traced to Thomas Malthus, the British scholar and Anglican clergyman (albeit a very misguided one) who, without any specific knowledge other than his own speculations, predicted in 1789 that the planet’s rapid increase in population would soon outstrip the planet’s ability to produce...

December 14, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Population control groups have been using the hype surrounding the Copenhagen climate change conference to promote their solution to hypothetical impending environmental catastrophes. Earlier this month, two pieces appearing in the same edition of the Guardian revisited a report by Britain's Optimum Population Trust (OPT) that suggests that people in wealthy first-world countries should "offset" the carbon cost of their jet-setting lifestyles by paying to prevent the births of poor children in the developing world. John Vidal, the Guardian's environment editor, wrote that the OPT's report suggesting a "radical" plan to cut carbon emissions was...

Population growth is the real driver for higher greenhouse gas emission, so why don't more mainstream solutions start there? Andrew Revkin, an environmental reporter for The New York Times and author of the paper's Dot Earth blog, warns that the math is pretty depressing. There are about 6.8 billion people on the planet today, a number projected to get to 9 billion by 2050. Americans, the world's greatest per-capita emitters of greenhouse gas emissions, produce about 20 tons of the stuff per person, per year. If we were to cut that in half, as emissions rose with the quality of...

As we all know but are sometimes reluctant to contemplate, oil is a finite, non-renewable resource. This automatically means that its use is not sustainable. If the use of oil is not sustainable, then of course the added carrying capacity the oil has provided is likewise unsustainable. Carrying capacity has been added to the world in direct proportion to the use of oil, and the disturbing implication is that if our oil supply declines, the carrying capacity of the world will automatically fall with it. These two observations (that oil has expanded the world's carrying capacity and oil use is...

Regular readers will recall that we are on the verge of a population problem. Fertility rates have been falling across the globe, and in nearly every industrialized country are already below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. Despite the appearance of a world bursting at the seams with an ever-greater number of people, the current growth rate is slowing and the world's population is likely to peak about nine billion and then begin contracting - precipitously - by 2080. Regular readers also will recall that there are convincing, if not certain, reasons to suspect that population contraction could...

The experts do not agree when the Earth's population reached 6.5 billion, but they generally agree that it has. The U.S. Census Bureau chose February 25, 2006, but the United Nations Population Division (UNDP) had picked July 2005. The People's Daily of China's Communist Party, intent on reducing the population of the world's largest nation by any means necessary, went with Dec. 19, 2005. Both the UN and Census Bureau believe world population will continue to rise, with the UN predicting 9.1 billion by 2050 and the bureau 9.2 billion. It is taken as divinely revealed dogma by the media...