Friday, October 14, 2011
Victoria Jackson Goes to 'Occupy Wall Street'
spent two days with the "Occupiers." Most were college students and uninformed but passionate. Many were "high." The improv comedienne/radical environmentalist had never heard of Ian Plimer. The M.D. likes Obamacare but has just changed professions. An angry black woman shouted about "Troy." Union people marched by with identical T shirts and signs. Free food and medics were provided. (By whom? Soros?)
Although the "Occupiers" and "Tea Party" have one thing in common - we don't want the government to "bail out" corporations - the two movements are completely opposite. The "Occupiers" are being controlled by Saul Alinsky radicals who are 'transforming' America from a free country to a communist one, and the "Tea Party" is controlled by 'grassroots' folks who uphold the Constitution, worship the Creator and are fighting to keep America a free country
Recently, PatriotUpdate.com sent Victoria Jackson to the Occupy Wall Street Protest in New York city to film what the protesters are protesting. The video of her conversations with them has brought on a storm of attacks from many liberal websites including the Huffington Post, Examiner and Entertainment Weekly. This is the second part of that footage.
Saturday, October 8, 2011
Global Economic Meltdown Says Governor of the Bank of England
Sir Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, this week called the current financial crisis “the most serious… since the 1930s, if ever”, in justification for a further £75 billion of “quantitative easing”. Since Sir Mervyn cited the chaos of the inter-war years, it seems appropriate to quote Winston Churchill: “Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusions of counsel, until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong – these are the features that constitute the endless repetition of history.”
We are at just such a moment again. Little more than two years ago, global leaders were happily congratulating themselves on having avoided the mistakes of the 1930s, thereby averting a depression. But now it appears that the difficulties of 2008 were but a foretaste of what was to come. With the European banking system again on the verge of collapse, there is a sense that politicians and economists are out of options, that governments and central banks are powerless before events. The best of the cavalry has been sent into battle, and it has come back in tatters. The fiscal armoury has been exhausted, the support offered by the boom in emerging markets such as China and India over the past two years seems to be on its last legs, and there is but the small rifle fire of the central bank printing presses left to defend us.
If it has been obvious for some time that we are caught up in an extreme financial crisis, the extent of its severity has acquired greater clarity in being described by the Governor of the Bank of England. Never before has the global financial system been so interlinked and integrated, which means that problems in one part of the world are capable of causing severe stress almost everywhere else. We once more face a perfect storm of cascading default, contracting credit and collapsing economic activity.
Yet, despite the parallels, the current situation need not end in the same catastrophe of economic, political and social meltdown as occurred in the 1930s. For most advanced economies, these outcomes are still avoidable. But escaping them is going to require leadership, nerve and collective resolve – things that have so far been in short supply.
The problem is not in Britain – which, despite the appalling legacy of debt left by the last government, is doing most of the right things – but in mainland Europe, where lack of foresight, unwillingness to act, confusion of counsel and lack of clear thinking are indeed everywhere to behold. We can but hope that self-preservation will eventually force governments into corrective action, but they are leaving it perilously late.
US Treasury Department States That Obama Has Spent More Debt Than ALL Presidents Combined
(CNSNews.com) - The Obama administration passed another fiscal milestone this week, according to new data released by the Treasury Department. As of the close of business on Oct. 3, the total national debt was $14,837,099,271,196.71—up about $44.8 billion from Sept. 30.
That means that in the less-than-three-years Obama has been in office, the federal debt has increased by $4.212 trillion--more than the total national debt of about $4.1672 trillion accumulated by all 41 U.S. presidents from George Washington through George H.W. Bush combined.
This $4.212-trillion increase in the national debt means that during Obama’s term the federal government has already borrowed about an additional $35,835 for every American household--or $44,980 for every full-time private-sector worker. (According to the Census Bureau there were about 117,538,000 households in the country in 2010, and, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were about 93,641,000 full-time private-sector workers.)
When Obama was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2009, according to the Treasury Department, the total national debt stood at $10,626,877,048,913.08.
GALLUP Poll Shows Young Adults Want Gov’t to ‘Promote Traditional Values’
(CNSNews.com) - While a Lexis-Nexis search indicates that U.S. newspapers and wire services included in that database published 291 stories yesterday and today citing the vaguely defined, left-wing Occupy Wall Street movement, not one of them mentioned a Gallup poll quietly released yesterday that documented a trend Gallup itself cannot explain: a “recent surge” in the percentage of young adults who say government should “promote traditional values.”
In fact, American between the ages of 18 and 34 are now more likely than Americans in older age brackets to say government should promote traditional values. This reverses the historical pattern in Gallup’s polling on this question.
In the most recent survey, conducted Sept. 8-11, Gallup asked 1,017 Americans age 18 and older this question: “Some people think the government should promote traditional values in our society. Others think the government should not favor any particular set of values. Which comes closer to your own view?”
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Memphis Hospital Partners with Churches for Health Care Services
Memphis, TN, United States (KaiserHealth) – Two mainstays of the Memphis community — the Methodist Le Bonheur hospital system and nearly 400 local churches — have teamed up for an innovative program that helps keep church members healthy while reducing health-care costs. If not actually made in heaven, it’s a match that has significantly benefited all parties. Other health-care systems are taking note.
Methodist says 70 percent of its patients belong to churches. To help people get the care they need when they need it, the system assigns hospital staff, appropriately called “navigators,” to work with volunteer liaisons at area churches that have joined the health system’s Congregational Health Network. When a member of one of these congregations is admitted to the hospital, the navigator notifies the liaison. The liaison then plans a visit, if the member wishes, “so they have a support structure, not just the nurse and doctor,” says Valerie Murphy, the liaison for her small church of six families in Millington, a rural area north of Memphis.
When it comes time to discharge the patient, the liaison works with the navigator to make sure that the transition happens smoothly, connecting the patient with community services such as meals-on-wheels and transportation.
“It’s the social connections, the nitty-gritty practical stuff that makes a huge difference,” says Gary Gunderson, senior vice president for the health system. “Whether people understand how to take their medications, whether there’s food in the house.”
The health system compared the experiences and costs of 473 patients in the program with those of similar non-participating patients who received standard care from 2007 to 2009: The mortality rate for those in the network was 50 percent lower than for non-participating patients; their hospital readmission rates were 20 percent lower.
In the future, Methodist expects to reap savings by reducing the need for high-end specialized care and avoiding penalties for hospital readmission, says Teresa Cutts, Methodist’s director of research for innovation at its Center of Excellence in Faith and Health.
Patient education is another key to the program’s long-term success. In addition to helping hospital patients, the liaisons work to educate members of their congregations about healthful living and disease prevention. Murphy, for example, regularly posts information about risk factors for chronic conditions such as diabetes and heart disease in the church bulletin and on the church bulletin board, and she brings in experts to discuss chronic conditions.
Tyrone Griggs credits a sharp-eyed liaison at his church with his diabetes diagnosis nine months ago. The liaison noticed he was having trouble reading his Bible, he says, and talked with his wife about getting him tested. Griggs, 48, drives a truck and doesn’t have health insurance. But the liaison referred him to a nonprofit clinic that serves the uninsured.
“They monitor me and taught me how to take care of myself,” he says. “I’ve been going there ever since.”
Methodist may have one of the most extensive programs, but it’s by no means the only health system partnering with churches to improve congregation members’ health. At Loma Linda University Medical Center in Southern California, medical staff from the Seventh-day Adventist health system provide free health screening and education to members of area churches, says Dora Barilla, the medical center’s director of community health development.
Recently, for example, a neurologist with the Loma Linda physicians group spoke at a Temecula church with a large Hispanic population about the signs of stroke and early dementia, and about available services. “Our research showed that Spanish-speaking populations weren’t necessarily accessing dementia services,” says Barilla.
Although many health systems that are working with churches to develop their “health ministries” are faith-based, not all are. For more than a decade, the Inova Health System in Northern Virginia has been working with religious communities on health promotion and prevention through its Congregational Health Partnership. To better serve the area’s wide variety of faiths and languages, Inova employs different program managers to work with Hispanic, Muslim, Korean, Vietnamese and African American groups, says Maria Schaart, a physician who works with Hispanic churches.
If all this volunteer work sounds like a very good deal for financially strapped health-care systems, it is. “We’re saving a lot of money,” says Gunderson. “We’re mobilizing and aligning hundreds of people that we couldn’t pay,” he says, referring to the roughly 500 volunteer church liaisons.
Churches welcome the opportunity to work with health systems to help their members. “The church community wants to provide those hours,” says Mara Vanderslice Kelly, acting director of the Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Why Young Christians are not waiting until marriage
By John Blake, CNN
(CNN) –True love doesn’t wait after all.
That’s the implication in the upcoming October issue of an evangelical magazine that claims that young, unmarried Christians are having premarital sex almost as much as their non-Christian peers.
The article in Relevant magazine, entitled “(Almost) Everyone’s Doing It,” cited several studies examining the sexual activity of single Christians. One of the biggest surprises was a December 2009 study, conducted by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, which included information on sexual activity.
While the study’s primary report did not explore religion, some additional analysis focusing on sexual activity and religious identification yielded this result: 80 percent of unmarried evangelical young adults (18 to 29) said that they have had sex - slightly less than 88 percent of unmarried adults, according to the teen pregnancy prevention organization.
The article highlights what challenges abstinence movements face. Movements such as “True Love Waits,” encourage teens to wear purity rings, sign virginity pledges and pledge chastity during public ceremonies.
Yet many of these Christian youths eventually abandon their purity pledges, Relevant’s Tyler Charles concludes in the article. Tyler talked to people like “Maria,” an evangelical woman who said she wanted to wait until marriage to have sex.
But she said she started having sex with her college boyfriend when she turned 20 because nearly everyone, even most of her Christian friends, were having sex.
Maria:
It seemed everyone in my life, older and younger, had “done it.” In fact, I waited longer than most people I knew and longer than both of my sisters, even though we were all Christians and came from a good home.
Relevant theorizes about why it’s so hard for so many young Christians to wait, including the saturation of sex in popular culture, the prevalence of pornography and a popular “do what feels good philosophy.”
Worldwide study shows more kids are having SEX
LONDON (Reuters) - Young people across the globe are having more unprotected sex and know less about effective contraception options, a multinational survey revealed on Monday.
The "Clueless or Clued Up: Your Right to be informed about contraception" study prepared for World Contraception Day (WCD) reports that the number of young people having unsafe sex with a new partner increased by 111 percent in France, 39 percent in the USA and 19 percent in Britain in the last three years.
"No matter where you are in the world, barriers exist which prevent teenagers from receiving trustworthy information about sex and contraception, which is probably why myths and misconceptions remain so widespread even today," a member of the WCD task force, Denise Keller, said in a statement with the results of the study.
"When young people have access to contraceptive information and services, they can make choices that affect every aspect of their lives which is why it's so important that accurate and unbiased information is easily available for young people to obtain," Keller said.
The survey, commissioned by Bayer Healthcare Pharmaceuticals and endorsed by 11 international non-governmental organizations, questioned more than 6,000 young people from 26 countries including Chile, Poland and China, on their attitudes toward sex and contraception.
The level of unplanned pregnancies among young people is a major global issue, campaigners say, and the rise in unprotected sex in several counties has sparked concern about the quality of sex education available to youngsters.
In Europe, only half of respondents receive sex education from school, compared to three quarters across Latin America, Asia Pacific and the USA.
Many respondents also said that they felt too embarrassed to ask a healthcare professional for contraception.
"What young people are telling us is that they are not receiving enough sex education or the wrong type of information about sex and sexuality," spokeswoman for the International Planned Parenthood Federation, Jennifer Woodside said in a statement.
"The results show that too many young people either lack good knowledge about sexual health, do not feel empowered enough to ask for contraception or have not learned the skills to negotiate contraceptive use with their partners to protect themselves from unwanted pregnancies or STIs (sexually transmitted infections)," she said.
DEAD SEA SCROLLS are now Online!
ERUSALEM — Five of the main Dead Sea scrolls, containing some of the oldest-known surviving biblical texts, were on Monday put online as part of a joint project between the Israel Museum and Google.
The project gives the public access to ultra high-resolution images of the ancient scrolls in a format which is easily searchable, with the magnified text revealing details previously invisible to the naked eye, a museum statement said.
So far, five of the scrolls have been digitised as part of the $3.5-million project which uses space-age technology to produce the clearest renderings yet of the ancient texts: the Great Isaiah scroll, the Community Rule scroll, the commentary on Habbakuk, the Temple scroll and the War scroll.
By visiting http://dss.collections.imj.org.il/ web users can view all of the text, as well as a translation tool and other background information on the documents, the museum said.
"We are privileged to house in the Israel Museum's Shrine of the Book the best preserved and most complete Dead Sea Scrolls ever discovered," Israel Museum director James Snyder said in a statement, describing them as of "paramount importance" for the world's monotheistic religions.
"Now, through our partnership with Google, we are able to bring these treasures to the broadest possible public."
The 900 biblical and other manuscripts, comprising some 30,000 fragments, were discovered between 1947 and 1956 in the Qumran caves above the Dead Sea and photographed in their entirety with infra-red technology in the 1950s.
The parchment and papyrus scrolls contain Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic writing, and include several of the earliest-known texts from the Bible, including the oldest surviving copy of the Ten Commandments.
The oldest of the documents dates to the third century BC and the most recent to about 70 AD, when Roman troops destroyed the Second Jewish Temple in Jerusalem.
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