JUSTIN MCCARTHY, - The Gallup Organization
Stephan: One out of four adult Americans is not just overweight, they are obese.
Click through to see the graphs.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In the U.S., the adult obesity rate is 27.7% thus far in 2014. This compares with the 27.1% average in 2013 — the highest annual rate Gallup and Healthways have measured since beginning to track obesity in 2008.
American Adults, by Weight Category
The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which uses respondents’ self-reports of their height and weight to calculate body mass index (BMI) scores, differs slightly from government reports of obesity, which are based on actual heights and weights found in clinical measurements. Individual BMI values of 30 or above are classified as “obese,” 25 to 29.9 are “overweight,” 18.5 to 24.9 are “normal weight,” and 18.4 or less are “underweight.” For the past six years, nearly two-thirds of Americans have had BMIs higher than are recommended, while roughly 35% of Americans have been in the “normal weight” category.
Thirty-five percent of Americans are classified having a normal weight so far in 2014, while 35.3% of adults are considered “overweight.” Meanwhile, underweight Americans make up a very small 2.1% of the adult population.
The obesity rate was 25.5% in 2008 when Gallup and Healthways first began tracking it. The percentage of obese adults has fluctuated since then, but is now 2.2 percentage […]
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, - Agence France-Presse (France)/The Raw Story
Stephan: The Congress may be unclear about climate change, but NASA is not. The billions invested in Cape Canaveral are ultimately doomed, and they know it.
Sea level rise is threatening the majority of NASA’s launch pads and multi-billion dollar complexes famous for training astronauts and launching historic missions to space, scientists said Tuesday.
From Cape Canaveral in Florida to mission control in Houston, the US space agency is busily building seawalls where possible and moving some buildings further inland.
Five of seven major NASA centers are located along the coast. Experts say that proximity to water is necessary for safety and logistics when launching rockets and testing spacecraft.
Many NASA centers have already faced costly damage from encroaching water, coastal erosion and potent hurricanes, said a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Perhaps the most iconic launchpad lies in Florida at the Kennedy Space Center, the lift-off point for the Apollo missions to the Moon and many space shuttle flights over the past three decades.
‘According to NASA’s planning and development office, rising sea levels are the single largest threat to the Kennedy Space Center’s continued operations,” said the report, which also listed various historic sites across the United States that also are threatened by sea level rise.
They include the Statue of Liberty in New York, the first permanent British colony in North America at Jamestown Island in Virginia, […]
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Stephan: You may remember the Lavabit story which burst into the media last year. Today I got this from the founder. The story may make you angry but this is the state of the national American surveillance state. Very scary stuff. I donated to his Legal Defense Fund. This is not any America I want to live in.
My legal saga started last summer with a knock at the door, behind which stood two federal agents ready to serve me with a court order requiring the installation of surveillance equipment on my company’s network.
My company, Lavabit, provided email services to 410,000 people, and thrived by offering features specifically designed to protect the privacy and security of its customers. I had no choice but to consent to the installation of their device, which would have provided the government with access to all of the messages, for all of my customers, as they travelled to and from other providers on the Internet.
But that wasn’t enough. The federal agents also said their court order required me to surrender the company’s private encryption keys, and I balked. What they claimed to need were customer passwords, which were sent securely, so they could access the plain-text of messages for users taking advantage of my company’s encrypted storage feature. (The government would later claim they only demanded the encryption keys because of my “noncompliance”.) I didn’t realize until I retained an attorney that what the agents proposed would have exceeded their authority.
Bothered by what the agents were saying, I informed them I would first […]
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KATIE VALENTINE, - Think Progress
Stephan: Local governments that actually have to govern and meet people's needs, particularly those locales in Red value states, are beginning to recognize that as the result of the willful ignorance of the Theocratic Right they may not get the help they need either from their state government, or the Federal government. They realize that it is up to them.
Click through to see the maps which make it clear why local authorities have no time for the Right's nonsense.
Susanne Torriente remembers waking up on Thanksgiving morning in 2012 and discovering that four blocks of Florida’s main coastal highway had washed away overnight.
Tropical Storm Sandy, before it turned into a superstorm and traveled up the East Coast, was the immediate culprit, as were the smaller storms that hit South Florida in the following weeks. But none of those storms had been major, not by Florida standards. Instead, it was high tide combined with sea level rise that had washed significant amounts of sand away from the beach and wiped out State Road A1A alongside it.
For Torriente, Assistant City Manager of Fort Lauderdale, the destruction caused by the combination of storms and high tide was proof that the city needed to do something different.
We can’t just replace things the way they were – we have to take into consideration what we know now, and design things for the future.
‘This is because of what we know now. We can’t just replace things the way they were – we have to take into consideration what we know now, and design things for the future,” Torriente said.
State Road A1A was repaired to better withstand increased flooding, an attention to the impacts of […]
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ABBY HAGLAGE, - The Daily Beast
Stephan: The DEA's and the DOJ's inability to distinguish hemp from marijuana is deliberate, and willfully ignorant. The Obama administration has chosen to be notably obtuse and unhelpful in this matter.
Click through to see the actual documents.
The Bluegrass State is eager to grow hemp for the purposes of research and commerce. Instead, its hemp seeds just became the latest casualty in the DOJ’s war on drugs.
Not long ago in America’s history, hemp was king. ‘Make the most of the hemp seed and grow it everywhere,” George Washington instructed his new America.
So vital to our young nation’s success was hemp, that the 1619 Virginia Assembly actually deemed it illegal for farmers not to grow the plant. It’s strange then, given how deeply entrenched hemp once was in the American landscape, to watch Kentucky fight the Department of Justice-not only for the right to grow it, but the seeds to do so.
After challenging the Drug Enforcement Administration’s decision to seize 250 pounds of seeds from the Louisville Airport in court last Friday, the Kentucky Agriculture Department will meet the feds across the aisle Wednesday. The fate of hemp production in America hangs in the balance. So how did hemp go wrong?
In the mid-1700s, hemp-derived from the same plant as marijuana-was ubiquitous, used for everything from food to fabric. While originating from cannabis sativa, like pot, it contains only a negligible amount of THC (the psychedelic chemical in weed). […]
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