Okay, so there I am in Allentown PA this past week...

[Javaman]

Why Allentown? well that's where my mom is for her assisted living.

While there I got a chance to drive around for a bit and take in the "sights".

Aside from strip mall after strip mall, I got a chance to visit Bethlehem PA and the site of the former Bethlehem Iron Works. All I have to say is wow!

Wow because of is truly enormous size and wow to how sad it is for it to be closed. Once the powerhouse for the American steel industry, it now lays in ruin as an icon of what was.

Sprawling, giant sized factory buddings dominate the landscape. I was so hoping to see one of the old crucibles that was used to hold the molten steel. Alas, there are no tours, just an endless cyclone fence keeping us out.

The main factory sat on the horizon like some sort of bizarre mechanical beast straight out of H.G. Wells. Huge smoke stacks, gigantic warehouses and it's own rail line.

As I drove around the immediate neighborhood, I couldn't help but think what this area was like when it was booming. I tried to imagine the now over grown churches, houses and blind alleys alive with workmen going to and from the plant when steel was king.

Now, sadly, our steel industry, like many others is outsourced to china and korea. Cheaply made products with bits of slag.

Old train tressels, old abandoned buildings of unknown use dot the landscape.

One morning, I took my mom to the Bethlehem diner. Typical of most Greek style diners in the northeast.

My mom who just turned 83, noted at the meal if I noticed how grossly overweight everyone was? Prior to this vacation, I was getting worried about my own weight. I'm 6'2" and almost 200 pounds. I just had my 44th birthday and could use more exercise. However, looking around this diner, I was damn near runway model weight compared to these folks.

There is an epidemic of obesity in this nation. People eat eat eat and I'm beginning to know why. Yeah, crappy food shoved at us, bad advertising overwhelming us, and just plain laziness are all causes, but I think there is something far more distressing.

Depression. Certainly not the monetary kind (at least not yet) and not the individual kind of sleeping on the couch for days on end (although that might be a part of it) but more of the group think kind.

Job after job after job after industry after industry after way of life are parceled out to the lowest bidder in our era of third world production competition. How low can you go? All in an effort to save a buck or 1000 on overhead. walmart comes to mind.

As a result a sort of group depression comes in. As the economy falters on very weak numbers, as the housing bubble bursts soon to be followed by the credit crash, people who are either directly involved or marginally involved all feel the effects of a society that is going horribly wrong.

Couple that with oil peaking and no solid energy plan by the admin* and climate change, one could say that the US is poised for a fall.

When it will happen? that's anyones guess, but I think it will be certainly sooner rather than later.

We live in an era of over indulgence and slowly we are waking up to the events of the morning after.

And this will be a bute of a hangover.

[TomInTib]

1. Thanks, Javaman.

That was certainly an invigorating read.

By the way, I have lost 17 lbs in four weeks by just eating smart. I was 6', 187lbs, and am now at 169 and I feel great.

And I am drinking as much as ever. Well almost (a couple of martinis and 2+ bottles of wine a night).

I also have a new girlfriend, a Laplander who grew up north of the Arctic Circle with eight siblings in a reindeer-skin hut. She has a decidedly negative view on the general gluttony and poor food choices made by Americans.

"Overindulgence"?

Bingo

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

3. Man...

I gotta come out there and hang around you. Maybe get next to some of the women you don't latch onto or something. ;-)

The little town I live in there is 6 types of available women:

1. Married

2. "yer' going to jail for 20 years" underaged.

3. Shaped like a pear.

4. Certifiably insane.

5. Maximum 3 teeth.

6. Alcoholic.

Or any combination thereof. It's a situation for which they just have not, to date, manufactured enough Viagra, Cialis and Levitra, separately or in aggregate.

[TomInTib]

4. #4 made me spit couscous salad on my monitor.

I tell ya, I'm eating healthy.

Now I know what those Arctic Circle folks practice during the dark months. And I am the full beneficiary.

Come on out, T_S, there's plenty wimmen for all of us.

And they got money.

[jedr]

2. If you ever get to Pittsburgh;

Go to the John Heinz museum down on the strip.....will show you what a steel town looked like in it's heyday.....on edit: Overweight people are not limited to Allentown, high fructose corn syrup has turned us into type 2 diabetes proteges.

[GreenPartyVoter]

5. Russia has its vodka and we have our Big Macs

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

6. Ok, I'm gonna help you a bit with this:

You are closer to 100% correct than you know.

I live in Warren County NJ, which is right next to Lehigh Valley. Oh, the Lehigh Valley Chamber of Commerce and Economic development Council make all sorts of great noises about all the jobs that are coming out here, but here are the facts:

The high-paying jobs are gone. All the jobs that are being created are low-paying jobs. Hell, even the IT jobs, the few listed, are for $12-15/hr, tops. NJ has lost 115,000 high-paying jobs and they have been replaced by 125,000 low paying jobs. And our politicians crow, morons that they are.

Crime in Lehigh Valley, especially in Allentown is rampant, violent and constant. Lots of armed robberies. The solution for bethlehem is to turn the steel mills into a giant slots casino.

The sense of desperation and ennui, all over the area, is so thick you can cut it with a knife.

[truedelphi]

8. And the thing that is never mentioned is that it is 2007

$ 10 to $ 15 a hour was considered okay wages back in the late sixties.

but it is 2007.

The steelworkers made at least $ 24 an hour - and then increases each year that they stayed on as workers. And that was late 1960's money. When $ 24 an hour culd buy you a house.

[1776Forever]

7. For Some of Those Overweight People in Ohio and PA - Thyroid Problems

It is a little known fact that people who were brought up around OH and PA deal with a lack of iodine which causes a higher rate of thryoid goiter and weight gain problems.

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http://www.lewis-clark.org/content/content-article.asp?ArticleID=730

On the way down the Ohio River in September of 1803, Meriwether Lewis was told of "some instances of goitre in the neighbourhood" of today's Washington County, Ohio, among people who had emigrated from lower Pennsylvania.

Goiter is a painless but disfiguring enlargement of both lobes of the thyroid gland, caused by absence of sufficient iodine to produce hormones. The thyroid glands enlarge themselves in an effort to compensate for the lack of iodine. The side effects are various and often profound.

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My family is from that area and my Mother's family, including me, had a lot of problems with weight because of this. Everyone in the family ate the same thing, but a few of them would have the goiter and thyroid issues that brought with it weight management problems. One of the main things that a person, like myself, has to avoid is STRESS! Two of my sons have been to Iraq 1 and 2 and may go again, and one of my sons' has MS but didn't have insurance and was in his 30's with no under age children so my husband, his step-father, and I had to take care of him for 2 years and almost went bankrupt. I believe that your scenerio is correct! There are a good amount of people who are depressed and stressed out because of this economy and along with their health issues their body is tipped over to gain more weight then they would normally.

[eridani]

9. Absence of work seriously disrupts social solidarity

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1695733

OBJECTIVES. Earlier studies found striking differences in mortality from myocardial infarction between Roseto, a homogeneous Italian-American community in Pennsylvania, and other nearby towns between 1955 and 1965. These differences disappeared as Roseto became more "Americanized" in the 1960s. The present study extended the comparison over a longer period of time to test the hypothesis that the findings from this period were not due to random fluctuations in small communities.

METHODS. We examined death certificates for Roseto and Bangor from 1935 to 1985. Age-standardized death rates and mortality ratios were computed for each decade.

RESULTS. Rosetans had a lower mortality rate from myocardial infarction over the course of the first 30 years, but it rose to the level of Bangor's following a period of erosion of traditionally cohesive family and community relationships. This mortality-rate increase involved mainly younger Rosetan men and elderly women.

CONCLUSIONS. The data confirmed the existence of consistent mortality differences between Roseto and Bangor during a time when there were many indicators of greater social solidarity and homogeneity in Roseto.

[Dogmudgeon]

10. Fat is the new Sex

Virtue is found in self-denial.

The entertainment media put an increasing amount of credence in stereotypes about it.

One's career chances are inhibited by it.

There is a tremendous amount of self-righteousness over it, masquerading as concern for health.

In fact, there is an entire body of "scientific" mythology addressing it. (From anti-masturbationism in sexuality, to J.P. Rushton's claims that African-Americans are too sexed-up to develop self-control.)

The un-virtuous are considered to be "sloppy" and "dirty". (Bodybuilding slang already includes talk of a "clean" diet.)

They are increasingly penalized. Insurance rates are increased. The law overlooks victimization by crime. Children are taken away from their parents on the grounds that the parents are unfit.

The original meanings of name-calling epithets are conflated with "evil" ("Republican media whores" with sex, "fat Republican fucks" with weight).

There have been similar efforts made to moralize drug use and large-age-difference dating and marriage, but the groups of sinners they affect are too small to be useful; smoking has too-politically-powerful lobbies; and there is also too much ambiguity in legal vs. illegal variants. But with obesity becoming so common, it is the logical choice for our new moral crusade.

As we have heard in every moral crusade, all criticism is henceforth defined as "justification". Vice must be punished. No excuses will be tolerated. What part of (the current crop of clichés) don't you understand?

--p!