Life expectancy on British estate is lower than Haiti or Iraq (it's not the smoking stupid)

Telegraph UK ^ | February 12, 2011

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Men on the Gurnos estate in Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales, can expect to live 58.8 years - three years less than people in Haiti and eight years less than those in Iraq.

Life expectancy....is 20 years lower than the national UK average - and the same as it was for men in Britain back in the depression era of the 1930s.

The grim figures revealed by the local Public Health Board are blamed on poor diet, heavy smoking and a high suicide rate due to unemployment.

There is also a "culture of despair" in the former iron and coal town where men don't care about living long healthy lives - because their quality of life is so poor.

"A lot of Merthyr people rely on benefits and are generally poorer, and poverty affects health."

The figures were given to Merthyr Tydfil Council after a study into men's life expectancy by the Cwm Taf Public Health Board.

Board director Nicola John said: "There is a strong correlation between being out of work and public health.

"Figures show that suicide in men who have been out of work for more than six months increases by 40 per cent."

....Huw Lewis, Assembly Member for Merthyr Tydfil, said: "Gurnos suffers from very high levels of deprivation which have been ingrained over many decades.

"Traditionally high rates of unemployment and the associated problems, all have a bearing on life chances and life expectancy of residents."

Chief medical officer Dr Tony Jewel said: "This is unacceptable and we are committed to tackling the underlying causes.

"Smoking and obesity continue to be major causes of health inequalities.

"Measures are in place to discourage people from smoking or to help them quit and a number of initiatives are in place to improve people's lifestyle and diet."

[Cincinatus' Wife]

British housing "estates" are similar to U.S. housing "projects."

The Gurmos housing estate in Merthyr Tydfil

"..........and poverty affects health."

Social engineering!

What's killing these men isn't smoking and drinking. Smoking, drinking and suicide are symptoms of unemployment, welfare, public housing, bad education and government run health care. Generational, government entrapment and social engineering has stolen their hopes and extinguished any spark of human endeavor. The understanding, belief and the ability to shape their own lives (freedoms) has been bred out of them. People can not be treated like live stock and thrive.

This story could just as well have been written about U.S.Democratic Party controlled districts that specialize in wearhousing people -- where they destroy the lives and potential of their constituents -- keep them so buried in poverty and ignorance through social engineering, that they can demand their votes out of fear and dependency.

Now we are watching this play out on the national level under the Obama Administration: the loss of jobs, depressed housing market, government run health care, crumbling public education, rising food and energy prices, personal safety concerns, judges overruling the vote, huge national debt and the systematic theft of our quality of life and the loss of freedoms for coming generations.

[668 - Neighbor of the Beast]

Starnesville syndrome, yes.

[Leisler]

Better to live in material poverty, and have your soul be rich. The depression of UK 'estates', American ghettos/'projects' is a feature of the system, and not a bug or error.

[Venturer]

There is also a “culture of despair” in the former iron and coal town where men don’t care about living long healthy lives - because their quality of life is so poor
.........................................................
Coming soon to coal towns in the US with the help of EPA and it’s ruler Obama.

[Waco]

Not to worry, the gov’t will do all it can, spare no effort, to make it worse.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Chilling. This is the mantra of the Green Movement today: 1939 "The City" Socialist "utopia" video.

"...Old Greenbelt was settled in 1937 as a public cooperative community in the New Deal Era. The concept was at the same time both eminently practical and idealistically utopian: the federal government would foster an "ideal" self-sufficient cooperative community that would also ease the pressing housing shortage near the nation's capital. Construction of the new town would also create jobs and thus help stimulate the national economic recovery following the Great Depression.

Greenbelt, which provided affordable housing for federal government workers, was one of three "green" towns planned in 1935 by Rexford Guy Tugwell, head of the United States Resettlement Administration, under authority of the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act. The two other green towns are Greendale, Wisconsin (near Milwaukee) and Greenhills, Ohio (near Cincinnati). A fourth green town, Roosevelt, New Jersey (originally called Homestead), was planned but was not fully developed on the same large scale as Greenbelt. Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, helped Tugwell lay out the town on a site that had formerly consisted largely of tobacco fields. Eleanor Roosevelt also was heavily involved in the first cooperative community designed by the federal government in the New Deal Era, Arthurdale, West Virginia, which sought to better the lives of impoverished laborers by enabling them to create a self-sufficient, and relatively prosperous, cooperative community. Cooperatives in Greenbelt include the Greenbelt News Review, Greenbelt Consumers Coop grocery store, the New Deal Cafe, and the cooperative forming the downtown core of original housing, Greenbelt Homes Incorporated (GHI)

The architectural planning of Greenbelt was innovative, but no less so than the social engineering involved in this federal government project. Applicants for residency were interviewed and screened based on income and occupation, and willingness to become involved in community activities.[4] African-Americans were initially excluded,[5] but were welcomed by the Greenbelt Committee for Fair Housing founded in 1963[6], and came to number 41% of residents according to the 2000 census,

Much of the community is located within the Greenbelt Historic District; listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980....." Greenbelt, Maryland

[NoExpectations]

government cheese = more poverty and despair

The government has removed any incentive to better oneself so why is any day different than the last?

[Cincinatus' Wife]

If you have time, watch the 1939 video “The City” linked in the post above.

[Senator John Blutarski]

Cincinatus’ Wife wrote: “People can not be treated like live stock and thrive.”

..... The essence of the issue in ten words. Well put, madame.

[BobL]

It looks like Tony Blair’s ‘investment’ of trillions of dollars has not quite reached this town yet.

LOL.

[Former Proud Canadian]

mark

[Quickgun]

Hit the nail on the head!!

[sodpoodle]

IIRC: a few years ago - when the economy and housing market in the UK were booming - many county councils decided to sell their inventories of public housing to long-term tenants. ‘Council Housing’ was not free; most tenants occupied and paid rent for decades; took pride in their homes - tended gardens and made repairs.

Not all Housing Estates were ghettos. The ‘housing community’ pictured shows appalling neglect and deterioration. It has probably been in this condition for decades. A lost civilization.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Blaise Pascal said that most of men’s troubles come from their inability to sit quietly in their room. These folks suffer from a certain learned passivity that is at odds with human nature. Human beings need challenges, we need stress.

[Condor51]

"Measures are in place to discourage people from smoking or to help them quit and a number of initiatives are in place to improve people's lifestyle and diet."

Yeah that's the ticket. Stop smoking.

Forget that these GUBMINT PROJECTS look like three steps up from DETROIT, as I'm sure that has nothing to do with it.

And also on the upside, the Green Eco-Nazis in London can feel pretty good about shutting down all the Coal and Iron Mining in the area. As THAT was really harmful to these peoples health. Not to mention their outlook on life. So what if they're all suicidal now because they're out of work. At least the air is cleaner now.

[Chode]

see what paying people to sit at home all day smoking, drinking and eating junk food gets you???

[Cincinatus' Wife]

I'm glad to hear that. But....

I hear of so many girls getting their own public housing unit as soon as they get pregnant and all the families that "live" in government housing and the problems with gangs (also a growing problem in the U.S.).

This article on a gypsy family really struck me. Gipsy family housed in £1.2m home in north London[excerpts] "Tom O'Leary, 42, and his wife Tanya Walsh, 39, live at the five-bedroom property in Muswell HIll, north London with their 12 children.

...In the last decade the council has placed them in 20 different homes, one of which was burned down. Both parents are unemployed and on benefits. Their family of five boys and seven girls are all aged between one and 16.

Mrs Walsh complained: "The council have not given us any furniture and are slow to carry out repairs. They don't have the money to help travellers since David Cameron got into government."

Their neighbours have now begun a campaign to get them evicted. Other complaints include throwing discarded bottles and beer cans into other people's gardens and allowing their dogs to bar for hours at a time." [end excerpt]

[ketelone]

Smoking, drinking too much, and being a lard@ss will also do it.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Hi Condor51. I don't know if you've seen this. (good LINKS embedded at source)

No Coal, No Power, No Gas Feb 11, 2011 [full text] Let's see if I get this straight. During the early February cold spell in the southern plains, when wind chills in Dallas dipped to minus twenty degrees, Texans were going without power to heat their homes and businesses even as the state was sitting on massive surpluses of natural gas. Even hospitals were having to switch to emergency generating systems. And this in the state with the largest energy production capacity in the continental US.

How was it that Texas suffered an extended period of rolling blackouts at a time when there's a glut of coal and natural gas waiting to be used?

The answer may be quite simple. It seems that a great deal of natural gas got "stuck in the pipes" because there was not enough electricity to operate the pumps to move it along. And there was not enough electricity to operate the pumps because environmentalists had seen to it that plans for new coal-powered generating plants had been shuttered back in 2007. So without the coal, there was no electricity, and without the electricity, there was no natural gas. And since much of the natural gas was intended to supply electrical power generating plants, there was even less electricity to supply the pumps and everything else.

The Texas power blackouts affected millions of homeowners and businesses, as well as vital services such as hospitals, schools, and police and fire services. An extended loss of power during periods of extreme temperatures endangers everyone. It cuts off emergency responders from those in need, and it leaves citizens freezing in their homes. The loss of power reduces modern society to an anarchic level where each is left to fend for himself.

Unfortunately, environmentalists in Texas who blocked the construction of coal-powered plants and shut down others during the last decade did not consider these consequences. All that they thought of was that coal is "dirty," so coal must go. They did not consider what would take its place. Had the coal generating facilities that were planned a decade ago by Texas Power been in place, the rolling blackouts of 2011 might well have been avoided.

As it happened, plans for construction of eight large coal-powered plants were scrapped in 2007 in a private equity deal crafted by the environmental action group, Environmental Defense. Under the agreement, TXU, the Texas power company, agreed to discontinue plans for eight Texas plants, halt construction of coal-powered plants in other states, reduce its carbon footprint to 1990 levels, and endorse the US Climate Action Partnership agenda. This radical transformation of TXU contributed to regulatory approval for takeover of the company by private equity group KKR (Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts).

It is ironic, considering the freezing temperatures that Texans endured during the first week of February, that an agreement to discontinue construction of coal-powered plants was predicated on the now discredited theory of man-made global warming. In order to lower global temperatures, as they imagined, environmentalists pressured TXU to accept a plan that made it impossible for the citizens of Texas to heat their homes.

Can there be any doubt that the agreement to discontinue eight large power plants was a contributing factor in the rolling blackouts of February 2011? The generating capacity supplied by these plants would not have been dependent on the pumping of natural gas. It would have continued to heat homes and businesses, and to power emergency services, throughout the storm. Instead, the state was left depending on an inherently less reliable mix of power sources. The Texas blackouts are a foretaste of what the rest of the country can expect, given the concerted effort of the Obama administration to shut down coal generating plants and to place obstacles in the way of coal mining. Just weeks ago, the EPA revoked the permit for Arch Coal's Spruce Number One mine in Virginia, one of the largest coal mining projects in the country. For the past two years, in fact, the EPA has pursued a hyper-aggressive program of enforcement that seems intended to price coal electrical generation out of the market. As in Texas, plans for new coal power plants have been scrubbed. They have been replaced by plants powered by natural gas, and by heavily subsidized wind and solar generation.

The problem is that natural gas plants have not come on line quickly enough to replace the coal generation that has been lost, and wind and solar, which make up only 1% of power generation anyway, are inherently unreliable. The wind does not blow all the time, nor does the sun shine at night. Had the US retained its reliable base of coal power generation, there would be less danger of further blackouts. As it is, much of the country is in danger of experiencing outages similar to those in Texas.

Ironically, the US is in danger of power blackouts at a time when it is exporting greater and greater amount of coal to China and other countries. Already, America is sending 80 million tons of coal overseas, but plans are underway to increase exports by 10% in 2011. Countries overseas understand that coal is the cheapest and most reliable form of energy available for producing electrical power. At a time when America is curtailing its coal generating capacity, China and India are building one new coal generating plant every week. And America is shipping its vital resources overseas even as its citizens are left, quite literally, out in the cold. [end]

[sodpoodle]

There is no cure for poverty of the soul.

The program I remembered was put in place by Margaret Thatcher. It returned billions in revenue to the Gubmint.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_Act_1980