Lois Parshley, Senior Investigative Reporter - The Lever
Stephan:
I have been telling you for years that one of the things we were going to see as a result of climate change was an insurance apocalypse. I have said it is going to affect the lives of millions of people, and be the cause of significant internal migrations. Well here it is, as it is well described in this article.
A resident surveys the damage after a superstorm hit New Jersey. Wayne Parry / AP
We’ve got ourselves a little monster out there,” anchorman Jim Cantore warned, facing the camera in the Weather Channel’s newsroom on a sultry August weekend in 1992. At first, few in Florida were paying attention. “It’s very hard to get people to believe that there’s some danger from some element of nature that they haven’t experienced before,” a reporter told Cantore, as the channel played tape of tranquil beaches and neat vacation homes.
As the storm approached Florida, it gained the moniker “Andrew,” rapidly intensifying into a Category 5 hurricane as it exceeded wind speeds of 165 mph. Karen Clark watched updates on TV from her home in Boston with fascinated horror — and her career on the line.
Most insurance companies at that time assessed hurricane exposure in their portfolios by simply multiplying customer premiums by a rough factor of supposed risk, rather than tracking actual property […]
For nearly 10 years the Republican Party has been trying to dismantle public education in the United States, and turn education into a private profit making activity, where children are indoctrinated and converted religiously. Americans are already the least literate and numerate population in the developed world and that is one of the intentions of the christofascists. All of this is designed to destroy the middle-class and turn the American population into ignorant peasants easily manipulated through their fear and anxieties. It is all happening right out in the open and almost no one in the corporate media and only a few real journalists, like ProPublica, seem to understand what is going on.
Families and students tour a new building on the campus of Temple Christian School in Lima, Ohio, in August. The expansion will accommodate increased enrollment thanks to families using vouchers. Credit: Mackenzi Klemann / The Lima (Ohio) News
The state of Ohio is giving taxpayer money to private, religious schools to help them build new buildings and expand their campuses, which is nearly unprecedented in modern U.S. history.
While many states have recently enacted sweeping school voucher programs that give parents taxpayer money to spend on private school tuition for their kids, Ohio has cut out the middleman. Under a bill passed by its Legislature this summer, the state is now providing millions of dollars in grants directly to religious schools, most of them Catholic, to renovate buildings, build classrooms, improve playgrounds and more.
The goal in providing the grants, according to the measure’s chief architect, Matt Huffman, is to increase the capacity of private schools in part so that they can sooner absorb more voucher students.
“The capacity issue is the next big issue on the horizon” for voucher efforts, Huffman, the Ohio Senate […]
The United States has become a nation defined by its corruption. The petroleum corporations will do anything to protect their profits even as their products destroy the wellbeing of Earth. The individuals that control these corporations don’t seem to understand or believe that they, their families, and their descendents will be affected by what they are doing.
Members with the group Divest Princeton protested BP’s annual meeting on campus with researchers from Princeton’s Carbon Mitigation Institute. Credit: Divest Princeton
“Universities globally are often caught in a web of financial and research dependencies with the fossil fuel sector. These ties not only conflict with the ethics of academic independence but also hinder the progress of genuine climate research,” Campus Climate Network said on its website.
One institution, Princeton University, seems to have actually owned an oil company — Petrotiger, named after its mascot — earning it millions of dollars, reported The Guardian.
Six analyses put together by students at each institution focused on Princeton,
Here is an aspect of the corruption of the Supreme Court I had never considered. I knew that Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society was a Roman Catholic and Opus Dei member, and that six Justices are catholics, but I did not know of the Opus Dei connection in the Court. It is a measure of the failure of corporate journalism that none of the journalists who routinely cover the Court have reported and properly emphasized it. Our laws are determined by six christofascists.
Justices Amy Coney Barrett, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Samuel Alito either belong to or are close to members of Opus Dei, the secretive lay movement within the church, first created in Spain by Father Josemaría Escrivá in the 1920s.
Opus Dei critic Matthew Fox is in no doubt about the power that the secretive group now yields on the Catholic justices.
“The Supreme Court itself has become a cesspool of religious ideology ignoring the pluralism of American culture in favor of a far-right version of evangelical and Roman Catholic Christianity committed to anti-abortion fanaticism,” writes Fox.
The outline philosophy of the justices as professed in Alito’s memorable dismissal of Roe v Wade last month closely mirrors the priorities of Opus Dei (in English, Work of God) the deeply conservative Catholic group they owe fealty to.
Anybody asking what the opinion of Opus Dei is on the issue of abortion would be left in no doubt as to group’s hardline views that all abortions be banned. Roe v Wade may have been […]
Cheryl D. Fryar, M.S.P.H., Margaret D. Carroll, M.S.P.H., and Joseph Afful, M.S. , Division of Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys - National Center for Health Statistics
Stephan:
Obesity is a disease that occurs when there is an abnormal or excessive accumulation of fat that poses a risk to health. The World Health Organization (WHO) and the CDC define obesity as a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or higher for adults. A BMI between 25 and 29.9 is considered overweight. Morbid obesity is defined as a BMI of more than 40, which is roughly 80 pounds overweight for women and 100 pounds overweight for men. You can calculate your BMI here: https://www.forhers.com/tools/bmi-calculator.
A primary care physician who is, herself, an SR reader sent me this, and wrote that in the 30 years of her practice her patients, young and old have become ever more obese, and would I publish this in SR to warn people they needed to talk with their physicians about how to lose weight because their lives depended on it. As I thought about this study I realized she was right, and that it is a growing problem shaping the American culture. I have already published in SR that Americans have much shorter lives — typically about seven years shorter — than people in other developed democracies, and that obesity resulting from poor diet is one of the major causes of this shortened life span. If this is an issue for you, or someone you know please do help them get the assistance and guidance they need.
Results from the 2017–2018 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), using measured heights and weights, indicate that an estimated 42.5% of U.S. adults aged 20 and over have obesity, including 9.0% with severe obesity, and another 31.1% are overweight. Body mass index (BMI), expressed as weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared (kg/m2), is used commonly to classify overweight (BMI 25.0–29.9), obesity (BMI at or above 30.0), and severe obesity (BMI at or above 40.0). Age-adjusted trends in overweight, obesity, and severe obesity prevalence from 1960–1962 through 2017–2018 are shown in Table 1. Because surveys before 1988 did not include persons over age 74, Table 1 shows the prevalence for adults aged 20 and over since 1988, and for adults aged 20–74 for all survey periods dating back to 1960. The age-adjusted sex-specific trends of overweight, obesity, and severe obesity among adults aged 20–74 from 1960–1962 through 2017–2018 are shown in the Figure. Table 2 contains the prevalence of obesity by age for men and women since 1988–1994, and Table 3 […]
The United States, it makes me very sad to say, on the basis of objectively verifiable data, is a second-tier nation in everything but militarism. The military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned us about has become one of the largest corporate corrupters in our society. It began with the Viet Nam war but becam supercharged with George W. Bush’s obscene “war on terror” which has caused the U.S. to be at a kind of low grade war ever since. Since Bush was president (2001-2009) we have never not been at war somewhere at some level. If not with our own troops, as the supplier of death weapons. It has been a fabulously profitable time for the corporations that make the weapons, and Citizens United legalized their overt bribery of politicians, which made it so much easier to keep the scam going. Putting aside the moral evil as this report describes, is the climate impact of these wars, and the weapons used in them. I have suspected this for some time, but this is the first fact-based report I have seen describing what this militarism is doing to Earth’s climate. You never hear anyone in media talking about this, but the effects are there nonetheless.
A soldier in the Afghan National Army (ANA) walks past a burn pit at a command outpost recently handed over to the ANA from the United States Army on March 22, 2013, in Kandahar Province, Zhari District, Afghanistan. Credit: Andrew Burton / Getty
This week marks 23 years since George W. Bush declared a U.S.-led “war on terror” and the people of Afghanistan and Iraq are still suffering its consequences.
After the U.S. invaded Iraq, an estimated half a million Iraqis were killed and at least 9.2 million were displaced. From 2003-2011, more than 4.7 million Iraqis suffered from moderate to severe food insecurity. Over 243,000 people have been killed in the Afghanistan/Pakistan war zone since 2001, more than 70,000 of them civilians. Between 4.5 and 4.6 million people have died in the post-9/11 wars.
The U.S.’s “war on terror” also escalated the climate catastrophe, resulting in local water shortages and extreme weather crises that are only getting worse. In 2022, Afghanistan had its worst drought in 30 years and it is […]
