New York leads the nation on gun legislation

From Pew Stateline on 02/07/19

New York hadn’t passed a comprehensive gun control package since the December 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. The legislature in 2013 passed a law that limited high-capacity magazines, implemented universal background checks and revoked the gun licenses and weapons of the severely mentally ill.

Democrats, after winning control of the state Senate in November, immediately started work to approve more bills.

The legislature in January passed six measures that ban bump stocks, extend waiting periods for gun purchases, prevent teachers from carrying guns in schools and allow law enforcement to remove guns from people judged to pose a danger to themselves or others. The bills passed largely along party lines and were signed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat.

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Editor's note: Due to progressive gun legislation New York has one of the lowest gun fatality rates in the Nation.

MBH index - Composition of 116th congress of the United States

• number of member of the House of Representatives in the United States = 435
• Length of term of a member of the House of Representatives = 2 years
• Number of representatives in the Democratic party = 235
• Number of representatives in the Republican party = 198
• Number of representatives who are female = 102 = 23%
• Percentage of Republican representatives who are white men = 90%
• Number of representatives who are Muslim women = 2

Cannibis use disorder lower in states with liberal policies on cannibis availability

Adolescents and young adults living in states with more liberal policies reported higher average rates of past-year cannabis use than those in states with more conservative policies, according to a new study conducted at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. However, the rates of cannabis use disorder -- abuse or dependence on the drug -- were significantly lower in states with more liberal policies compared to states with more conservative policies, for ages 12 to 17, and marginally lower for ages 26 and older. These results remained significant even when controlling for the presence of medical cannabis laws. This study is one of the first to assess the relationship between policy liberalism and health outcomes, and specifically cannabis use-related outcomes. The findings are published in the International Journal of Drug Policy.

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Do you have the integrity and courage to take the road less taken?

Had a discussion Monday with a 30 year old client who has been struggling to discern his calling in life. He told me how he had started down a path the last couple of months and decided last Friday that it wasn't for him.

He shared with me the relief he felt in deciding not to continue to struggle with something that just didn't seem right for him. His major fear, he told me, was disappointing the people who had been cheering him on.

Well, "to thine own self be true" and if one lives one's life for others, life is very short, but if one lives one's life listening to a different drummer than the one society wants him to listen to, it can be very long and fulfilling.

And then this evening I stubbled across this beautiful TED - ED rendition of  Robert Frost's wonderful poem, "The Road Not Taken".

Rilke said, "We should live the question." It takes integrity and courage and requires, sometimes, that we take the road not taken and it can make all the difference to our life.

The client and I talked about discerning God's will for us. "Living the question" with integrity is done with a willingness to discern who it is that God is calling us to become and what it is that God is calling us to do with our lives. Responding to God's will often takes faith and courage.

Health insurance uninsured goes up since individual mandate eliminated

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From Gallup report on 01/23/19

The uninsured rate rose for most subgroups in the fourth quarter of 2018 compared with the same quarter in 2016, when the uninsured rate was lowest. Women, those living in households with annual incomes of less than $48,000 per year, and young adults under the age of 35 reported the greatest increases. Those younger than 35 reported an uninsured rate of over 21%, a 4.8-point increase from two years earlier. And the rate among women -- while still below that of men -- is among the fastest rising, increasing from 8.9% in late 2016 to 12.8% at the end of 2018.

At 7.1%, the East region, which has in recent years maintained the lowest uninsured rate in the nation, is the only one of the four regions nationally whose rate is effectively unchanged since the end of 2016. Respondents from the West, Midwest and South regions all reported uninsured rates for the fourth quarter of 2018 that represent increases of over 3.0 points. The South, which has always had the highest uninsured rate in the U.S. but has seen some of the greatest declines at the state level, has had a 3.8-point increase to 19.6%.

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Editor's note:

Quality of life is often impacted more by social policy than individual choice. The policies of the Republicans have been major obstacles to improving health care in the United States which may have been a major reason in their historical defeats in the 2018 elections.

In general, citizens in Red states have much poorer health care coverage than in Blue States.

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More Americans are understanding that climate change is real

From New York Times on 01/22/19 by John Schwartz

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"A record number of Americans understand that climate change is real, according to a new survey, and they are increasingly worried about its effects in their lives today.

Some 73 percent of Americans polled late last year said that global warming was happening, the report found, a jump of 10 percentage points from 2015 and three points since last March.

The rise in the number of Americans who say global warming is personally important to them was even sharper, jumping nine percentage points since March to 72 percent, another record over the past decade."

For more information click here.

Editor's note:
It is a sign of hope that more Americans are becoming "reality based" instead of being duped by "fake news" and false beliefs promulgated primarily by politicians who have been elected due to financial support from fossil fuel companies into believing lies, fabrications, equivocatons, and disengenuous nonsense.

Exxon Mobile and other fossil fuel companies have known for years that the carbon emissions created by the burning of their products is affecting the climate of the planet earth. These companies, fearing a negative impact on their financial revenues, have kept this information not only secret, but have propogandized the American public and their elected policy makers into believing the opposite.

With the awareness of the American citizens rising to the truth of the matter, we can hope, working together, that we can mitigate the problem of carbon emissions and other climate destroying practicies we have created and participated in.

The truth can set us free but it takes more that just consciousness, we need to bring our awareness into application by changing climate damaging policies and practices. This means many things but perhaps the most sigfniciant for positive change at the macrosystemic level will be electing policy makers who are not afraid of the truth and who will act on it. It does no good to simply speak truth to power if power has no use for the truth. It is time to change those whom we give our power to who will do the right thing to enhance the well being of our planet and all the things that abide here.

Can we overcome the psychosis in our society and come to "really see?"

Tim Folger writes in the forward to The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2018 about the corruption of speech in our national conversations facilitated by cable news and social media. Mr. Folger points out that this corruption was foretold by George Orwell in his novel 1984 when he coined the term "Newspeak." This idea of the creation of propaganizing memes is at the heart of what is being called in the Trumpian age, "fake news."

"Early in 2017, for some strange reason, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four suddenly jumped to the top of Amazon’s bestseller list. Orwell laced his dystopian novel with Newspeak, the language of Oceania, one of the story’s perpetually warring states.

Here’s a short sampler of its Big Brother–approved vocabulary: minipax—the Ministry of Peace (Oceania’s war department, not to be confused with our Department of Defense); prolefeed—mindless mass entertainment; malquoted—what today’s authoritarians would call fake news. And then there’s blackwhite, a synecdoche for all the perversions of Newspeak: to believe that black is white. Our own leaders have given us “enhanced interrogation,” “collateral damage,” “clean coal,” and so many more."

Kean, Sam. The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2018 (The Best American Series ®) . HMH Books. Kindle Edition.

These propaganizing memes cannot be stopped because the means of dissemination are obiquitous. The best hope for restoring sanity to the members of our society is making them aware of the forces of communication which are being deployed to influence them so they can choose their own thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors and not just react in mindless ways.

In psychiatry, "psychosis" is a term of servere cognitive disorganization which places the person suffering from it out of touch with reality. It seems that we are witnesses to this daily in our news stories from politicians who express inaccurate ideas which do not correspond with any reality other than the one they are intending to create in their target audiences with their own dissembling.

Marianne Williamson, a Presidential candidate, tells us we have to "really see", "not just look, but really see." This ability to "really see" requires a maturity, a nonreactivity, an ability to apprehend a spiritual vision of self, community, and society which far exceeds what we have been led to hope for from politics.