February 2023: Article Round-Up
Interesting tidbits from across the internet
Note: click the headline to access the article.
US Teens Feel Down, But the Adults Aren’t All Right Either
America's mental health crisis can’t simply be blamed on social media and Covid-19.
The reality is that there is a mental illness epidemic throughout the population. It’s not just the kids who are not all right.
In 2019-2020, according to Mental Health America, 20.8% of adults were experiencing a mental illness, equivalent to more than 50 million Americans. Admittedly, the percentage of adults reporting serious thoughts of suicide is 4.8%, a quarter of the YRBS figure for high schoolers. However, according to MHA, the rate of substance-use disorder is 15.4% for adults, whereas it is only 6.4% for young people. A staggering 32.6 million people have an alcohol use disorder in the US, nearly all of them adults. Of these, at most 50% overcome their addiction and achieve sustained abstinence, according to Sliedrecht et al. (2019). Most of the estimated 108,000 drug overdose deaths in 2021 were of adults. This scourge is one of the principal reasons why — uniquely in the developed world — US life expectancy fell in 2020 and 2021, despite the fact that the US spends far more per person on health care than any comparable country.
The madness behind the battle for Bakhmut
Russian troops are dying in their thousands here
If you want to discover the madness of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, come to Bakhmut. The battle for the city is now the longest of the war. Russia launched a large offensive to try to take it in July 2022 after it took Severodonetsk, the final major city of the Luhansk region. The truth is Russian troops are dying in their thousands here — and possibly for nothing. The UK Ministry of Defence has outlined Bakhmut’s “limited operational value”: the city’s fall would be useful, but by no means decisive, in helping Russia press further through the Donbas. The fight, therefore, has become almost symbolic. “Bakhmut holds” is now a rallying cry for Ukrainians.
Bonus: Drone footage of Bakhmut
I Thought I Was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle.
There are more than 100 pediatric gender clinics across the U.S. I worked at one. What’s happening to children is morally and medically appalling.
Many encounters with patients emphasized to me how little these young people understood the profound impacts changing gender would have on their bodies and minds. But the center downplayed the negative consequences, and emphasized the need for transition. As the center’s website said, “Left untreated, gender dysphoria has any number of consequences, from self-harm to suicide. But when you take away the gender dysphoria by allowing a child to be who he or she is, we’re noticing that goes away. The studies we have show these kids often wind up functioning psychosocially as well as or better than their peers.”
There are no reliable studies showing this. Indeed, the experiences of many of the center’s patients prove how false these assertions are.
‘Woodstock’ for Christians: Revival Draws Thousands to Kentucky Town
Over two weeks, more than 50,000 people descended on a small campus chapel to experience the nation’s first major spiritual revival in decades — one driven by Gen Z.
The revival at Asbury began on Feb. 8, when a few dozen students lingered after an ordinary morning chapel service to continue singing and praying together. Word about the spontaneous gathering spread on campus, and by evening, students were dragging mattresses into the chapel to spend the night. Within days, their enthusiasm had exploded into a national event.
The university estimates that the revival has drawn more than 50,000 people to Wilmore, a sleepy town of 6,000 people where the grocery store hosts a weekly Bible study and police cars read “In God We Trust.” Asbury was founded in 1890, and its roots are in the Methodist and Wesleyan-Holiness tradition, which has a historical emphasis on transformative movements of the Holy Spirit.
Lab Leak Most Likely Origin of Covid-19 Pandemic, Energy Department Now Says
U.S. agency’s revised assessment is based on new intelligence
The U.S. Energy Department has concluded that the Covid pandemic most likely arose from a laboratory leak, according to a classified intelligence report recently provided to the White House and key members of Congress.
The new report highlights how different parts of the intelligence community have arrived at disparate judgments about the pandemic’s origin. The Energy Department now joins the Federal Bureau of Investigation in saying the virus likely spread via a mishap at a Chinese laboratory. Four other agencies, along with a national intelligence panel, still judge that it was likely the result of a natural transmission, and two are undecided.
(alternate link to the article)
Missing Something Holy
Perhaps we are not so different from the Taliban after all.
The interviews reveal men coming to grips with the goods and ills of urbanization and modernization after the religious intoxication of life in the wilderness waging holy war. They are diverting, amusing, and unexpectedly poignant.
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That is from Huzaifa (most Afghan men have only a given name), twenty-four, a former sniper and married father of two. For him, life in the big city is not all bad, but nor is it all good either.
“What I don’t like about the city is that it’s like a closed society. People live cheek-by-jowl but don’t interact with each other. This is in part bad, as people don’t cooperate with each other, but also has a positive feature: unlike the village, no one bothers you about what you do, what you wear, who comes to your home and who leaves it. People don’t interfere in your life and don’t talk about you behind your back.
There is another thing I dislike and that’s how restricted our lives are now, unlike anything we experienced before. The Taleban [sic] used to be free of restrictions, but now we sit in one place, behind a desk and a computer 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Life’s become so wearisome; you do the same things every day.”