Friday, February 21st, 2014
KATIE MCDONOUGH, - AlterNet (U.S.)
Stephan: I think religious fundamentalism ought to be considered a mental illness. Inevitably, and without exception across the globe, it always involves a deep sexual dysfunctionality and a compulsion to suppress and control women.
Kiera Feldman’s recent New Republic [3] report on the convergence of rape culture and evangelical culture at a private Christian university in Virginia is a deeply troubling story. It’s also a disturbingly familiar one.
In a series of interviews with female survivors of sexual violence at Patrick Henry College, Feldman uncovered an institutional pattern of victim-blaming and impunity for perpetrators that was grounded in the school’s strict adherence to evangelical doctrine, specifically its ‘gender complementarian” norms and toxic purity culture.
Though generally viewed as a safe haven for young people with an evangelical Christian worldview, Patrick Henry College turned out to be a very dangerous place to be a survivor of sexual assault. It is, in other words, much like everywhere else in this country.
Evangelical Christianity makes visible – through purity pledges and doctrine assigning women the role of man’s ‘helpmate” – the norms and expectations about female virginity and subservience that so often remain hidden in the secular world. While it may be tempting to draw a red line around Christian fundamentalist views on gender and sexuality to distinguish them from supposedly evolved ‘secular” culture, there is considerable, uncomfortable overlap between the two.
Here are four ways ‘secular” American culture mirrors Christian […]
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Friday, February 21st, 2014
RANDY DOTINGA, - HealthDay Reporter
Stephan: I flew back the other day from the Bay area and sat next to a woman who must have weighed close to 400 pounds. As you can imagine it was not a very comfortable flight and for most of it I found myself wondering how one becomes that fat. It doesn't happen overnight; it's a gradual process. I felt empathy for what her life must be like and, at the same time, confused about how one lets their life get that out of control. Clearly lack of exercise must be part of it. But I had no idea what a big issue this was until I read this story.
The study referenced in this story appeared recently in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
A new study suggests that obese women get just one hour of vigorous exercise a year, while obese men don’t do much better at fewer than four hours.
The findings startled the researchers, whose main focus was finding better ways to measure how much exercise people get.
“They’re living their lives from one chair to another,” said Edward Archer, a research fellow with the Nutrition Obesity Research Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “We didn’t realize we were that sedentary. There are some people who are vigorously active, but it’s offset by the huge number of individuals who are inactive.”
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than one in three people in the United States is obese, a step above being overweight. Obesity boosts the risk of cardiovascular problems such as heart disease and stroke, diabetes and some cancers.
One expert did note that the definition of vigorous exercise was very limited in the study, and the researchers themselves acknowledged that the device used to track physical activity did not measure swimming or biking very well.
In the new study, researchers examined the results of a 2005-2006 government survey of adults aged 20 to 74. Among other things, […]
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Friday, February 21st, 2014
CALVIN TERBEEK, - Houston Press
Stephan: Another data point showing the consequences of social values in social outcomes. When the Theocratic Right is in power, in state after state, and now at the national level, it can be clearly shown wellness declines. Voting Republican is voting for a shorter lifespan, more illness, higher infant and maternal mortality and, on and on. Voting conservative is voting for a degraded quality of life, and this is not a political argument in a polemic sense, but a data-based assessment. (See At the Cost of Your Life: Social Value, Social Wellness http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307%2813%2900249-8/fulltext and Social Values, Social Wellness: Can We Know What Works? http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307%2811%2900346-6/fulltext) Whether anyone will pay any attention to the facts remains unclear.
Let’s get this out of the way at the front. The study — the one I’m about to delineate — does not mean that there is a causal relationship between Republican presidents and infant mortality.
It means that after the authors controlled for certain relevant variables — e.g., education attainment, the unemployment rate, and economic inequality — there was a correlation between a GOP administration and higher rates of infant mortality. (Cue angry comment from Internet troll who does not even know what a regression analysis is).
Now that we’ve (hopefully) subordinated any knee-jerk responses, some new research (gated) indicates that, for reasons we do not yet know, infant mortality is higher under Republican presidents since 1965 (through 2010) than Democratic presidents.
The researchers, responsibly, say that further research is needed to determine if there is statistical causation. But we do know that when a Republican is in the White House, infant mortality — while dropping absolutely over the past seven-plus decades — is 3 percent higher. And, as an important side note, throw away the canard that we have the best health care system in the world; the U.S. ranks 31st, neighbored by Slovakia and Chile, in infant mortality.
The study’s finding do […]
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Friday, February 21st, 2014
DAVID EDWARDS, - The Raw Story
Stephan: Comments like this, and the worldview behind them, used to be considered tinfoil hat fringe. Today it is mainstream Theocratic Right conversation, believed by millions.
Click through to see the actual video.
Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) this week warned Americans to remember that God ‘wrote the Constitution” based on the Bible.
During an appearance on John Hagee Ministries’ Global Evangelism Television (GETV) network on Wednesday, host Matt Hagee asked the Texas Republican where the country had gone wrong.
‘I think we got off the track when we allowed our government to become a secular government,” DeLay explained. ‘When we stopped realizing that God created this nation, that he wrote the Constitution, that it’s based on biblical principles.”
‘Governments like we have are very easy to destroy,” Hagee later noted.
DeLay recalled that he had closed the Capitol rotunda for three hours as Majority Leader so that members of the House and Senate could get ‘on our knees seeking the face of God and praying.”
‘And I really feel now, Pastor Matt, the Lord has heard us, I see the Holy Spirit moving. And I pray every day for an awakening in this country,” he said, adding that people should get involved.
‘Join a group, a tea party or whatever.”
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Friday, February 21st, 2014
Mohamed Younis, - The Gallup Organization
Stephan: If you are an Afghani or an Iraqii is it any wonder you are passionately anti-American? In both countries the outcome of American occupation and war has been a significant degradation in the quality of life for ordinary people. I had lunch today with a good friend whose father was part of the Foreign Service of USIA. He grew up in India, Pakistan, and Turkey, and we spent some time talking about what Afghanistan was like when he was a boy living there, compared to the country that exists today. It was a very sad story. Then I came home and found this Gallup Poll which confirms his observations.
Click through to see the graphs that accompany this survey.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — As Afghans prepare to elect a new president and international forces start to withdraw, their hopes for the future are as grim as ever. The majority of Afghans (55%) rate their lives poorly enough to be considered “suffering,” the highest percentage Gallup has measured in the world in 2013.
Gallup classifies people as “thriving,” “struggling,” or “suffering” according to how they rate their current and future lives on a ladder scale with steps numbered from zero to 10 based on the Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale. Gallup considers people to be suffering if they rate their current lives a 4 or lower and their lives in five years a 4 or lower. The respondents do not label themselves as suffering.
While the majority of the Afghan population is suffering, which is disconcerting on its own, no Afghans rated their lives highly enough to be considered “thriving” in 2013. This is largely because their expectations for their lives in five years dropped to their lowest average since 2008, standing at 4.3 in 2013.
Afghans’ Economic Outlook Increasingly Grim
While Afghans express concerns about security issues and terrorism, some of their increasing pessimism about their lives appears to have economic roots. Only 5% of […]
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