Thursday, March 6th, 2014
JENNA LEVY, - The Gallup Organization
Stephan: Here is yet another manifestation of what happens to a society which makes social policy on the basis of religious belief as opposed to actual factual data. Living in a Red value state is dangerous to your health, and yet the voters in those states continue year after year to vote on the further degradation of their culture. It is an amazing social phenomenon.
Click through to see the many charts and graphs that accompany this survey report.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Mississippi had the highest obesity rate in the U.S. in 2013, at 35.4%, while Montana has the lowest rate, at 19.6%. The obesity rate has generally increased across the U.S. each year since 2008.
Ten States With Highest Obesity Rates Ten States With Lowest Obesity Rates
From 2010 through 2012, West Virginia maintained the highest obesity rate nationwide while Colorado had the lowest. Five states — Mississippi, West Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Kentucky — have been listed among the 10 states with the highest obesity rates in the nation since 2008. Colorado, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and California have routinely been states with lower levels of obesity — all four have made the list of the 10 states with the lowest obesity rates in the nation each year since 2008.
Explore complete state data >
The national obesity rate, as computed by respondents’ self-reported height and weight in the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, has increased to 27.1% from 26.2% in 2012, and is up 1.6 percentage points from 25.5% in 2008, Gallup’s initial year of tracking. Americans who have a BMI of 30 or higher are classified as obese.
More than two in 10 adults were obese in nearly every state in 2013, with […]
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Wednesday, March 5th, 2014
TOM ENGELHARDT, Co-founder of the American Empire Project - Truth
Stephan: This is an excellent geopolitical assessment of the world as it stands today. I agree with this view.
There is, it seems, something new under the sun.
Geopolitically speaking, when it comes to war and the imperial principle, we may be in uncharted territory. Take a look around and you’ll see a world at the boiling point. From Ukraine to Syria, South Sudan to Thailand, Libya to Bosnia, Turkey to Venezuela, citizen protest (left and right) is sparking not just disorganization, but what looks like, to coin a word, de-organization at a global level. Increasingly, the unitary status of states, large and small, old and new, is being called into question. Civil war, violence, and internecine struggles of various sorts are visibly on the rise. In many cases, outside countries are involved and yet in each instance state power seems to be draining away to no other state’s gain. So here’s one question: Where exactly is power located on this planet of ours right now?
There is, of course, a single waning superpower that has in this new century sent its military into action globally, aggressively, repeatedly -and disastrously. And yet these actions have failed to reinforce the imperial system of organizing and garrisoning the planet that it put in place at the […]
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Wednesday, March 5th, 2014
BENEDICT CAREY, - The Boston Globe
Stephan: This is the latest in the Military Suicide Trend, and a very important correction. This story reports on a series of studies that conclude: 'the baggage people bring with them and often don't disclose in order to get into armed services presumably interacts with the stresses of deployment" to increase vulnerability to suicide. And note that anger issues are the defining variable.
NEW YORK — Amid growing alarm at the rate of suicide among members of the military and confusion about possible causes, researchers reported Monday that most of the Army’s enlisted men and women with suicidal tendencies had them before they enlisted and that those at highest risk of making an attempt often had a long history of impulsive anger.
The findings were contained in three papers posted online Monday by the journal JAMA Psychiatry, including research done at Harvard University.
The studies found that about one in 10 soldiers qualified for a diagnosis of ‘intermittent explosive disorder,” as it is known to psychiatrists, more than five times the rate found in the general population.
This impulsive pattern, in combination with mood disorders and the stresses of deployment, increased the likelihood of acting on suicidal urges.
The new papers bring together five years of work by a coalition of academic, government, and military researchers, investigating hundreds of suicides and surveying thousands of active soldiers in anonymous questionnaires.
The effort began in 2008, after the suicide rate among active soldiers rose above the civilian rate among young healthy adults for the first time. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have relied on an all-volunteer Army, not a […]
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Wednesday, March 5th, 2014
David Brody, Chief Political Correspondent - CBN News
Stephan: I haven't done anything on the Secession Trend recently; here's the latest. Note, this is coming from a far right religious media source, which is what makes it particularly interesting.
GREELEY, COLORADO — If you mention the word “secession” most people think of the South during the Civil War. But today, a new movement is gaining steam because of frustration over a growing, out-of-control federal government.
A number of conservative, rural Americans are taking about seceding and creating their own states, meaning a new map of the United States of America could include the following:
A 51st state called Jefferson, made up of Northern California and Southern Oregon
A new state called Western Maryland
A new state called North Colorado
These are real movements gaining traction with voters across the country. Jeffrey Hare runs the 51st State Initiative in Colorado, an effort to fight an out-of-control legislature trying to ram big government policies down the throats of voters.
“We’re at this point of irreconcilable differences,” Hare told CBN News.
Secessionist talk has filled town hall meetings and the divide discussed is not just ideological.
“It’s predominately left versus right, but it’s urban versus rural because you typically find more typical conservative values in rural America,” Hare said.
An Attack on Colorado?
That’s the crux of the issue. Rural Americans across many states feel they’re not being […]
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Wednesday, March 5th, 2014
ANDREW WOLFSON, - The Courier-Journal
Stephan: The linkage of America's gun psychosis with the Religious Right's resentment, anger, and hate has never been clearer. Guns for Jesus. What an idea.
The Kentucky Baptist Convention is organizing gun giveaways across the state in an effort to help ‘unchurched men” find Jesus Christ.
Chuck McAlister, a former Outdoor Channel hunting show host who is in charge of the effort, told The Courier-Journal that 1,678 men have already made ‘professions of faith” at ‘Second Amendment Celebrations,” where they showed up hoping to get guns as door prizes in the last year.
On Thursday, Lone Oak Baptist Church in Paducah was planning to giveaway another 25 handguns and shotguns. And organizers expected as many as 1,000 people to attend.
‘The day of hanging a banner in front of your church and saying you’re having a revival and expecting the community to show up is over,” McAlister explained to the paper. ‘You have to know the hook that will attract people, and hunting is huge in Kentucky… So we get in there and burp and scratch and talk about the right to bear arms and that stuff.”
The Courier-Journal points to an Internet video of McAlister speaking to Silverdale Baptist Church’s men’s wildlife supper last year in Tennessee last year. The 30 minute talk focuses on hunting and opposition to gun control, but makes little mention of Jesus or […]
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