By Daniel Rigney Imagine a guy so nerdy
that his idea of a big time is to spend the day combing through an
almanac, pocket calculator in hand, in search of savory tidbits of
information.
Sad. I know.
So I was in Barnes and Noble yesterday – the brickstore, not the website – and ran across the hot new 2015 World Almanac and Book of Facts. I sprinted to the checkout to buy it and raced home to explore its contents. I thought I’d share a few of my preliminary discoveries with you.
Did you know, for example, the United States suffers about 30,000 firearm deaths each year, and that nearly two-thirds of these are suicides? And did you know that nearly 90% of the latter are committed by men? (Ladies prefer pills.) Guns are dangerous enough when they’re pointed at others – Americans commit more than 10,000 gun homicides a year, not counting unprosecuted police shootings. But I didn’t know that most gun deaths are self-inflicted, did you? No guns in our house!
Turning to accidental deaths, we find that 36,300 in the U.S. lost their lives in motor vehicle accidents in 2012. That’s an abysmal figure, but it’s less than half the rate (per 100,000 population) of traffic deaths that occurred in 1970 and 1980, when about 54,000 died each year on our streets and highways. Conservatives can blame hundreds of thousands of saved lives in recent decades on tighter government safety regulations.
On the whole, the United States is becoming a less accident-prone society, but one category in particular is rising steadily -- accidental deaths by poisoning. This is due not to mysterious deaths of the Agatha Christie variety, but mainly to the growing number of drug overdoses, especially of opioid pain pills like methadone, hydrocodone, and oxycodone, also known as “hillbilly heroin” or “Rush’s rush.”
I’m also learning that, contrary to tabloid impressions, most categories of drug use among young people in the United States have declined steadily in recent decades. According to a large ongoing University of Michigan study, the percentage of high school seniors who report (anonymously) that they have “ever used” marijuana has declined from 60% in 1980 to 45% in 2013. Over the same period, seniors who report ever using alcohol declined from 93% to 63%, and tobacco smoking fell from 71% to 38%. Every other type of substance use, from hallucinogens to narcotics, also declined or remained stable. However, look for a surge in marijuana use this year in Denver and Seattle.
You probably know that crime rates in the U.S. have declined steeply in the U.S. since the early 1990s and are only about half what they once were for most categories of crime. Yet the United States still leads the world in incarceration rates, thanks largely to the "war on drugs," which has permanently stigmatized and destroyed far more lives than it's rescued. (See Michelle Alexander's powerful book The New Jim Crow for more.)
What about divorce rates? Do you suppose they’re still “skyrocketing”? Actually, they’ve been declining for three decades. Interestingly, divorce rates are generally highest in conservative red states with large rural populations. If we don’t count Nevada, home of the “quickie,” the four states with the highest divorce rates are Arkansas, West Virginia, Oklahoma and Alaska.
Turning now to the topic of hyperinequality, consider the monumental wealth and power of the Koch Machine. The almanac reports that political philanthropists Charles and David Koch have a combined net worth of nearly 80 billion dollars. According to my pocket calculator, that’s the equivalent of an NFL stadium packed to capacity, with a measly millionaire in every seat. With that kind of wealth, I imagine you could buy an entire political party, or even a government, in this age of Citizens United.
Other fun facts from the World Almanac:
The fastest roller coaster on the planet, at Ferrari World in Abu Dhabi, reaches 149 miles an hour.
The southernmost city in the United States is Hilo, Hawaii. The westernmost city, surprising to me, is not in Hawaii. It is Adak Station, Alaska, longitudinally speaking.
Bombay Beach, California is 223 feet below sea level.
The geographic center of the United States, including Alaska and Hawaii, is in Butte County, South Dakota. In the lower 48, it’s near Lebanon, Kansas.
Turning finally to American history, ...
The population of the United States is now more than 100 times what it was in 1776.
According to my almanac, the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States commits the nation to the “General Welfare” and the security of “Posterity.” It says nothing of the “Welfare of the Wealthy” or the security of their Property. Yet the Supreme Court decision in Citizens’ United (2010) clearly promotes the latter at the expense of the former. The decision's champion, Justice Antonin Scalia, was born in 1936 and will turn 80 soon. Charles Koch was born in 1935, his brother David in 1940. None of them is getting any younger. They'll be leaving us soon enough according to my almanac's life expectancy tables.
Meanwhile, Posterity is arriving, and will be generating facts of its own to fill the digitized and holographic almanacs of the future.
Danagram
Sad. I know.
So I was in Barnes and Noble yesterday – the brickstore, not the website – and ran across the hot new 2015 World Almanac and Book of Facts. I sprinted to the checkout to buy it and raced home to explore its contents. I thought I’d share a few of my preliminary discoveries with you.
Did you know, for example, the United States suffers about 30,000 firearm deaths each year, and that nearly two-thirds of these are suicides? And did you know that nearly 90% of the latter are committed by men? (Ladies prefer pills.) Guns are dangerous enough when they’re pointed at others – Americans commit more than 10,000 gun homicides a year, not counting unprosecuted police shootings. But I didn’t know that most gun deaths are self-inflicted, did you? No guns in our house!
Turning to accidental deaths, we find that 36,300 in the U.S. lost their lives in motor vehicle accidents in 2012. That’s an abysmal figure, but it’s less than half the rate (per 100,000 population) of traffic deaths that occurred in 1970 and 1980, when about 54,000 died each year on our streets and highways. Conservatives can blame hundreds of thousands of saved lives in recent decades on tighter government safety regulations.
On the whole, the United States is becoming a less accident-prone society, but one category in particular is rising steadily -- accidental deaths by poisoning. This is due not to mysterious deaths of the Agatha Christie variety, but mainly to the growing number of drug overdoses, especially of opioid pain pills like methadone, hydrocodone, and oxycodone, also known as “hillbilly heroin” or “Rush’s rush.”
I’m also learning that, contrary to tabloid impressions, most categories of drug use among young people in the United States have declined steadily in recent decades. According to a large ongoing University of Michigan study, the percentage of high school seniors who report (anonymously) that they have “ever used” marijuana has declined from 60% in 1980 to 45% in 2013. Over the same period, seniors who report ever using alcohol declined from 93% to 63%, and tobacco smoking fell from 71% to 38%. Every other type of substance use, from hallucinogens to narcotics, also declined or remained stable. However, look for a surge in marijuana use this year in Denver and Seattle.
You probably know that crime rates in the U.S. have declined steeply in the U.S. since the early 1990s and are only about half what they once were for most categories of crime. Yet the United States still leads the world in incarceration rates, thanks largely to the "war on drugs," which has permanently stigmatized and destroyed far more lives than it's rescued. (See Michelle Alexander's powerful book The New Jim Crow for more.)
What about divorce rates? Do you suppose they’re still “skyrocketing”? Actually, they’ve been declining for three decades. Interestingly, divorce rates are generally highest in conservative red states with large rural populations. If we don’t count Nevada, home of the “quickie,” the four states with the highest divorce rates are Arkansas, West Virginia, Oklahoma and Alaska.
Turning now to the topic of hyperinequality, consider the monumental wealth and power of the Koch Machine. The almanac reports that political philanthropists Charles and David Koch have a combined net worth of nearly 80 billion dollars. According to my pocket calculator, that’s the equivalent of an NFL stadium packed to capacity, with a measly millionaire in every seat. With that kind of wealth, I imagine you could buy an entire political party, or even a government, in this age of Citizens United.
Other fun facts from the World Almanac:
The fastest roller coaster on the planet, at Ferrari World in Abu Dhabi, reaches 149 miles an hour.
China is now the #4 international tourist destination in the world. (North Korea didn’t make the top 50.)
China
has twice as many Internet users as the United States, and four times
as many cell phone subscriptions, but discharges only about a third as
many carbon emissions per capita.The southernmost city in the United States is Hilo, Hawaii. The westernmost city, surprising to me, is not in Hawaii. It is Adak Station, Alaska, longitudinally speaking.
Bombay Beach, California is 223 feet below sea level.
The geographic center of the United States, including Alaska and Hawaii, is in Butte County, South Dakota. In the lower 48, it’s near Lebanon, Kansas.
Turning finally to American history, ...
The population of the United States is now more than 100 times what it was in 1776.
According to my almanac, the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States commits the nation to the “General Welfare” and the security of “Posterity.” It says nothing of the “Welfare of the Wealthy” or the security of their Property. Yet the Supreme Court decision in Citizens’ United (2010) clearly promotes the latter at the expense of the former. The decision's champion, Justice Antonin Scalia, was born in 1936 and will turn 80 soon. Charles Koch was born in 1935, his brother David in 1940. None of them is getting any younger. They'll be leaving us soon enough according to my almanac's life expectancy tables.
Meanwhile, Posterity is arriving, and will be generating facts of its own to fill the digitized and holographic almanacs of the future.
Danagram
No comments:
Post a Comment