religious selection and neurobiology

neuropolitics.org | Every now and then, the Darwinian underworld of religiosity rises like the blinding sun. The not-so-secret world of religion and reproductive advantage came to fore when the Texas Department of Protective Services took temporary custody of over 400 children from the compound of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (FLDS) near the small city of Eldorado.

Historically, the Darwinian origins of religiosity have drawn little attention from the community of evolutionary psychologists, due in part to the subtle and sometimes dangerous political undercurrents that frame scientific research. This hands-off policy has come to an end, just in time to catch this small sect of 10,000 members with its polygamous pants down. The FLDS has such an aggressive and religiously-tainted reproductive strategy that it has become the smoking gun of Friedrich von Hayek's proposal (1982) that the primary function of religion is reproductive advantage.

The FLDS is most notable by its peculiar adaptation of religious polygamy. Polygamy is a divisive problem for the continuity of social groups, as it produces large percentages of surplus males, with the corresponding negative social consequences. Monogamy is a safety valve for such societies, with only about 20% of the male population actually taking advantage of plural arrangements.

This cross-cultural polygamy estimate is very close to some estimates of the rate of Mormon polygamy in Utah in 1870, about 20 years before the institution of the anti-polygamy laws. By 1910, the rate of polygamy dropped in half, countering some of its negative cultural and genetic consequences: group splintering; lowered age of first-intercourse and conception for females; lower educational levels for females; greater average age of reproductive males; and, higher rates of inbreeding.

The rise of the FLDS, like the rise of Mormonism, follows a long tradition of religious splintering and reproductive advantage. The FLDS was formed after the Mormon renunciation of polygamy, which was punctuated by statehood for Utah in the late 1890s. The formation of the FLDS (and its sister splinter groups) had much in common with the original formation of Mormonism, and indeed, with sect formation in general: elevated male dominance and polygamy (or virtual polygamy); emigration to "promised lands"; high levels of intragroup cooperation and income redistribution; elevated levels of outgroup competition; xenophobia; "prophet" leaders with a privileged relationship to god (and privileged sexual access to the sect's females); high levels of reproductive output; economic endogamy (the favoring of religious insiders in economic transactions); and last but not least, a new variation or a recycling (fundamentalism) of religious doctrine.

humanity's defining moment?

Counsel on Renewal | Mish Shedlock has made a well-deserved name for himself, especially since the crash of 2008, as one of the few people who understand the problem we’re facing. I agree he’s way beyond the regular financial media that’s utterly clueless. This means he carries a certain moral obligation. But based on a recent article

I’m afraid he has yet to step up to the plate because he’s still endorsing the same archaic left vs. right, union vs. business, capitalist vs. socialist rhetoric from politicians who have no clue about the flaws in our debt-based monetary system.The 2-tier Economy
Embedded in the article is an unspoken assumption that the lower classes need to take pay cuts and layoffs so global bondholders and Chase bankers can be paid in full. That’s so…uh…20th century. If astute bloggers don’t start educating politicians by injecting into the political debate what they clearly know when they engage in market debate, the coming downward mobility for everyone but the bondholders is going to be galactic.

Mish agrees with NJ Governor Christie that the reason teachers are facing layoffs is because of teacher unions. Of course that’s true within the constraints of our current monetary system where lower class pay cuts are “good for the economy” while at the same time increased rent extraction by the financial class is “good for the economy.” One is the flip-side of the other. Manufacturing workers have learned this in spades, especially since their communities and way of life have been completely destroyed and moved to China. It’s a predator-prey economic relationship, precisely the reason unions exist in the first place. So what’s the real problem: the unions or the nature of the monetary system itself?

In a system where 100% of all money is sourced by going into debt to private capital holders who demand exponential returns, employees in fields like education which are managed on the balance sheet as “cost centers” must live within the austerity of cost reduction metrics. In real life terms, this means in order for the bondholders at the top to maintain their ever-increasing quality of life, millions of employees in cost centers must be happy with continually declining quality of life. During inflationary periods when capital holders are injecting more liquidity, this translates into cost center employees receiving raises that stay below the inflation rate (these teachers stayed ahead, but systemically across the entire economy, cost centers are managed below inflation–again just look at the offshoring). During deflationary periods when capital holders are removing liquidity, cost center AND revenue center employees take pay cuts and get fired so the capital holders can keep making more money.

Questioning the Status Quo
Unlike politicians, Mish is smart enough to step out of the existing monetary framework and ask himself what might be a better solution given the extreme situation we’re facing. Why doesn’t he? Why don’t most people? Perhaps they haven’t been faced with the type of austerity that forces a person to question the sanity of a system where all money is controlled by private capital. Or perhaps they’re “survival of the fittest” fundamentalists like Larry Summers, i.e. private sector bondholders deserve to win all the poker chips while everyone else is left with nothing. Or maybe they’ve just been enjoying a comfortable inflationary ride for so long that they can’t fathom the fatal flaw that’s been embedded in the monetary system from the very beginning.

That is…until now. The exponential game is reaching its end as the debt load approaches the point of saturation. If we don’t change the system before that inflection point, we’ll see the biggest austerity program ever as millions of people enter a tomorrow most people can’t dare to ponder today. In market terms, that inflection point is when global capital holders run on Treasuries and the Fed is forced to jack up its short rate to defend its balance sheet. That point may be next year or 10 years from now, but it’s coming if the status quo is not changed. And look out when it does.

This is not populist rhetoric, but the basic mathematical fact of our system.

Rather than justifying it, this should make us reevaluate the monetary system we’ve been living under for 100 years. We’ve experienced a lot of development. We’ve already built the brave new world. Does a never-ending stream of new gadgets from Apple, reality shows from Fox, and dead bodies from wars really justify milking more return on capital (ROC) from the lower classes forever? Of course we know that’s impossible. The system is reaching not only its human velocity limits but its mathematical limits. A systemic sabbatical has never been more necessary, so an alternative form of liquidity to supplement our current system is necessary. Fist tap Dale.

money as a zero-sum game

Reality Sandwich | In game theory, zero-sum games are those where one person's gain is another's loss. A poker game is zero-sum. Those busy accumulating hoards of money try to hide its zero-sum nature by saying that the "pie" is getting bigger. Prosperity is not a zero-sum game, though "prosperity" is too easily conflated with monetary wealth, which is not the same thing at all. Clearly, quality of life is not a zero-sum game-quite the contrary. The whole bodhisattva impulse of Mahayana Buddhism stems from recognizing that individual nirvana is incomplete until everyone is liberated.

All of the things that we might call "true wealth": health, enough to eat, shelter, meaningful work, diverse habitats and resources, beauty around one-natural beauty and artistic beauty-none are diminished by all having more.

But this is not true of money. If everyone had a million dollars, what would a million dollars be worth? Money is a usurper, it pretends to be wealth. And its pretension is backed up by force, creating a new type of slave: the mercenary. And most conveniently, the mercenary, truly the oldest profession, is paid in the money he protects. Money has power because of scarcity, and the threat of scarcity. Without money you will starve and die, even if there is food around. Without money you will become homeless, sleeping in the rain and shivering in the cold. Therefore when I say I need some dirty work done, you say yes. I say yes. We say yes.

Money is coercive, seductive, corrupting, and exploitative, hence often linked with diabolical power. "The love of money is the root of all evil," Paul's first letter to Timothy. Or, as amended by George Bernard Shaw: "The lack of money is the root of all evil." Both sayings seem true: greed for more in the already-haves wreaks destruction on a scale orders of magnitude beyond the petty crimes of the indigent. Still, lack of money, need for money, loads my soul with care.

Money seems like a natural and necessary part of the world, but, actually, it is neither. Money has a history and a biography. It had a childhood and an adolescence. No one knows if it has an old age and senility, unless that is now. No one really understands money, and certainly no one, not even the governments that print money, control it, despite their best efforts.

In some ways money is the ultimate pyramid scheme -- its value is surprisingly sensitive to human attitudes.

"Your money's no good here."

Others make money their god, their master. Pragmatic. Realist.

"Money will win. Trust me. And either you are with the haves or you are with the have-nots."

But how much "have" is enough? There seems no limit.

"use value" economics in the microcosmos

The Scientist | Microorganisms living in deep sea hydrothermal vents can grow off of energy derived from one of the simplest forms of anaerobic respiration ever described, according to a study published this week in Nature.

The reaction -- in which a chemical called formate is broken down into hydrogen and carbon dioxide -- was previously thought to be too energy poor to support the growth of even the smallest organisms. Finding single-celled microbes from Domain Arcahaea that can glean energy from it may point the way towards efficient hydrogen fuel production while providing clues as to how our planet's earliest inhabitants survived the harsh environment of a young Earth.

Formate is the simplest carboxylate anion, consisting of just one carbon, one hydrogen, and two oxygen atoms, and is an important player in fermentation reactions and anaerobic digestion. Some microbes are known to convert formate to methane and CO2 to produce energy, but the conversion of formate into hydrogen and CO2 wasn't thought to release enough energy to support microbial growth.

The problem, it seemed, was that the accumulation of hydrogen inhibits the reaction from continuing to occur. But in special circumstances, this may not be the case. In 2008, for example, Stams and his colleagues showed that in microbial communities where methanogens -- archaea that produce methane as a byproduct of metabolism -- live in partnership with fermentative bacteria that convert formate to hydrogen and CO2, the methanogens consume the hydrogen product of the reaction, allowing the reaction to continue. In doing so, enough energy is generated to support the growth of the bacteria.

The new study provides the first evidence that a microbe can derive energy from this conversion without the help of any partners. Sung Gyun Kang of the Korea Ocean Research and Development Institute and his colleagues were sequencing the genome of a strain of the deep-sea hydrothermal vent archaea Thermococcus onnurineus when they noticed it contained many copies of formate dehydrogenases and hydrogenases thought to be involved in formate conversion reactions.

yeast banksters....,

The Scientist | Yeast colonies with mooches, thieves and cheats actually grow faster and larger than colonies without these freeloading individuals, according to a study published 15th September in PLoS Biology, challenging the widely held belief that cheaters bring only bad news to cooperating populations.

Researchers found that when some yeast cheat their neighbors out of glucose, the entire population grows faster. "This is a most surprising result," said Laurence Hurst of the University of Bath in the UK, who coauthored the study. "The theory of cooperation was one of the best worked theories in all of evolution. Everyone assumed that it had to be the case that the world is better off when everyone cooperates."

The results may explain why yeast populations tolerate the presence of cheaters, added Michael Travisano, a biologist at the University of Minnesota, who was not involved in the research -- "because a mixed strategy is to everyone's benefit."

Most yeast secrete invertase, which hydrolyzes sucrose into fructose and glucose, their preferred food. However, some yeast are known to cheat the system. Cheater yeast don't secrete invertase and therefore don't contribute to the glucose production, yet they still eat the glucose that is generated by the rest of the population.

According to the theory of cooperation, which states that organisms are better off when everyone cooperates, yeast populations should be best off when all the yeast produce invertase. This would maximize the availability of glucose, which should enable more yeast growth. But when Hurst and his colleagues grew yeast populations with both producers and non-producers of invertase, this is not what they saw. Instead, the yeast grew the fastest and saw the highest population numbers when a proportion of the population was cheating.

phyles

Deugarte | The Internet is the great steroid jar of this century. Take the ethics of the lonesome Ivy League hackers of the 80′s and set them loose on the web: in 15 years you will get Linux, Firefox, free music, the Public Domain movement and the end of the old culture industry. Take the old BBS, fanzines and fan conventions, move them to the Internet, and you will get the greatest conversational community boom since the Babel Tower.

When conversations take place in languages such as French, Spanish, or Arabic, they become transnational with great ease. Only 2 out of every 5 people who write in French on the Internet live in France. More than half the readers of any Madrid website with more than 1000 visitors per day are in Latin America. Arabic in the Western islamic world has gone, in ten years, from being a religious language superimposed onto regional, almost mutually unintelligible varieties (Moroccan, Algerian, etc.), to having a standard that is gradually reunifying the local dialects: Al Jazeera Arabic.

Virtual communities arise in new spaces, the spaces of the various globalisations associated with the great transnational languages. The main players in these communities belong to two generations that have grown up with Himanen’s hacker ethic: the network logic of abundance and the work ethic of free software are the glue that binds the blogosphere. The result: conversational communities, identitarian, transnational non-hierarchical tribes, based on the powerful incentive that is recognition.

Let us place these communities in the midst of the whirlwind that is a world where national states are sinking and the globalisation of the economy is eroding all the good old institutions that used to make people feel secure. Many of these communities will wish to have their own economy, community companies and common funds.

Spanish cyberpunks went from cyberactivism and literature to constituting a group of cooperative enterprises straddling South America and Madrid. Their new banners: economic democracy, resilience, and transnationality. They changed names: now they are known as “Indianos”, the Spanish word for the emigrant who would return to his home village after making his fortune in the Americas. Only that the Indianos’ America has been the Internet, and their business has spread from consultancy to sustainable production or local development.

In these very same years, the Murides, the old pacifist Sufis from Senegal, went from having a nationalist discourse and growing peanuts to constituting a community trade network with two million members that spreads from South Africa to Italy. Its transformation isn’t over yet, but the young Murides have turned the daïras, the old Koranic schools, into urban communes that are also business cells.

At first blush, nothing could be farther apart than cyberpunks and the Murides. But the parallelism is significant: they are not companies linked to a community, but transnational communities that have acquired enterprises in order to gain continuity in time and robustness. They are phyles. Fist tap Dale.

peak denial about peak oil

TheBurningPlatform | It is par for the course that with oil hovering between $70 and $80 per barrel Americans have continued to buy SUVs and Trucks at a rapid pace. Politicians don’t have constituents screaming at them because gas is $4.00 per gallon, so it is no longer an issue for them. They need to focus on the November elections. It is no time to discuss a difficult issue that requires foresight and honesty. It is no time to tell the American public that oil will be over $200 a barrel within the next 5 years. Anyone who would go on CNBC today and declare that oil will be over $200 a barrel would be eviscerated by bubble head Bartiromo or clueless Kudlow. Bartiromo filled up her Escalade this morning for $2.60 a gallon, so there is no looming crisis on the horizon. The myopic view of the world by politicians, the mainstream media and the American public in general is breathtaking to behold. Despite the facts slapping them across the face, Americans believe cheap oil is here to stay. It is their right to have an endless supply of cheap oil. The American way of life has been granted by God. We are the chosen people.

A funny thing happened on our way to permanent prosperity and unlimited cheap oil. The right to prosperity was yanked out from underneath us by the current Greater Depression. The worldwide economic downturn has masked the onset of peak cheap oil. Therefore, when it hits America with its full fury, it will be a complete surprise to the ignorant masses and the ignorant politicians who run this country. A Gallup Poll in August asked Americans about our most important problems. Where is the concern about future energy supplies? It isn’t on the radar screens of Americans. They are probably more worried about whether The Situation will hook up with Snookie on the Jersey Shore reality show.

It is not surprising that the American public, American politicians, and the American media don’t see the impending crisis. The organizations that have an interest in looking farther than next week into the future have all concluded that the downside of peak oil will cause chaos throughout the world. The US Military, the German Military, and the UK Department of Energy have all done detailed studies of the situation and come to the same conclusions. Social chaos, economic confusion, trade barriers, conflict, food shortages, riots, and war are in our future.

15 shocking american poverty statistics

EconomicCollapseBlog | The following are 15 shocking poverty statistics that are skyrocketing as the American middle class continues to be slowly wiped out....

#1 Approximately 45 million Americans were living in poverty in 2009.

#2 According to the Associated Press, experts believe that 2009 saw the largest single year increase in the U.S. poverty rate since the U.S. government began calculating poverty figures back in 1959.

#3 The U.S. poverty rate is now the third worst among the developed nations tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

#4 According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, on a year-over-year basis, household participation in the food stamp program has increased 20.28%.

#5 The number of Americans on food stamps surpassed 41 million for the first time ever in June.

#6 As of June, the number of Americans on food stamps had set a new all-time record for 19 consecutive months.

#7 One out of every six Americans is now being served by at least one government anti-poverty program.

#8 More than 50 million Americans are now on Medicaid, the U.S. government health care program designed principally to help the poor.

#9 One out of every seven mortgages in the United States was either delinquent or in foreclosure during the first quarter of 2010.

#10 Nearly 10 million Americans now receive unemployment insurance, which is almost four times as many as were receiving it in 2007.

#11 The number of Americans receiving long-term unemployment benefits has risen over 60 percent in just the past year.

#12 According to one recent survey, 28% of all U.S. households have at least one member that is looking for a full-time job.

#13 Nationwide, bankruptcy filings rose 20 percent in the 12 month period ending June 30th.

#14 More than 25 percent of all Americans now have a credit score below 599.

#15 One out of every five children in the United States is now living in poverty.

As millions more Americans continue to climb on to the "safety net", how long is it going to be before it breaks?

The reality is that the system can only support so many people. We are now at a point where our anti-poverty programs are clearly unsustainable in the long-term, but nobody has a solution for how we are going to get all of these people off of these programs or how we are going to provide good jobs for all of them.

u.s. poverty on track to post record gain in 2009

AP | The number of people in the U.S. who are in poverty is on track for a record increase on President Barack Obama's watch, with the ranks of working-age poor approaching 1960s levels that led to the national war on poverty.

Census figures for 2009 — the recession-ravaged first year of the Democrat's presidency — are to be released in the coming week, and demographers expect grim findings.

It's unfortunate timing for Obama and his party just seven weeks before important elections when control of Congress is at stake. The anticipated poverty rate increase — from 13.2 percent to about 15 percent — would be another blow to Democrats struggling to persuade voters to keep them in power.

"The most important anti-poverty effort is growing the economy and making sure there are enough jobs out there," Obama said Friday at a White House news conference. He stressed his commitment to helping the poor achieve middle-class status and said, "If we can grow the economy faster and create more jobs, then everybody is swept up into that virtuous cycle."

Interviews with six demographers who closely track poverty trends found wide consensus that 2009 figures are likely to show a significant rate increase to the range of 14.7 percent to 15 percent.

Should those estimates hold true, some 45 million people in this country, or more than 1 in 7, were poor last year. It would be the highest single-year increase since the government began calculating poverty figures in 1959. The previous high was in 1980 when the rate jumped 1.3 percentage points to 13 percent during the energy crisis.

Among the 18-64 working-age population, the demographers expect a rise beyond 12.4 percent, up from 11.7 percent. That would make it the highest since at least 1965, when another Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, launched the war on poverty that expanded the federal government's role in social welfare programs from education to health care.

A formula by Richard Bavier, a former analyst with the White House Office of Management and Budget who has had high rates of accuracy over the last decade, predicts poverty will reach 15 percent.

That would put the rate at the highest level since 1993. The all-time high was 22.4 percent in 1959, the first year the government began tracking poverty. It dropped to a low of 11.1 percent in 1973 after Johnson's war on poverty but has since fluctuated in the 12-14 percent range.

number of families in shelters rises

NYTimes | For a few hours at the mall here this month, Nick Griffith, his wife, Lacey Lennon, and their two young children got to feel like a regular family again.

Never mind that they were just killing time away from the homeless shelter where they are staying, or that they had to take two city buses to get to the shopping center because they pawned one car earlier this year and had another repossessed, or that the debit card Ms. Lennon inserted into the A.T.M. was courtesy of the state’s welfare program.

They ate lunch at the food court, browsed for clothes and just strolled, blending in with everyone else out on a scorching hot summer day. “It’s exactly why we come here,” Ms. Lennon said. “It reminds us of our old life.”

For millions who have lost jobs or faced eviction in the economic downturn, homelessness is perhaps the darkest fear of all. In the end, though, for all the devastation wrought by the recession, a vast majority of people who have faced the possibility have somehow managed to avoid it.

Nevertheless, from 2007 through 2009, the number of families in homeless shelters — households with at least one adult and one minor child — leapt to 170,000 from 131,000, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

With long-term unemployment ballooning, those numbers could easily climb this year. Late in 2009, however, states began distributing $1.5 billion that has been made available over three years by the federal government as part of the stimulus package for the Homeless Prevention and Rapid Re-Housing Program, which provides financial assistance to keep people in their homes or get them back in one quickly if they lose them.

More than 550,000 people have received aid, including more than 1,800 in Rhode Island, with just over a quarter of the money for the program spent so far nationally, state and federal officials said.

Even so, it remains to be seen whether the program is keeping pace with the continuing economic hardship.

bacteria and climate change - invisible carbon pumps

The Economist | UNDERSTANDING how the oceans absorb carbon dioxide is crucial to understanding the role of that gas in the climate. It is rather worrying, then, that something profound may be missing from that understanding. But if Jiao Nianzhi of Xiamen University in China is right, it is. For he suggests there is a lot of carbon floating in the oceans that has not previously been noticed. It is in the form of what is known as refractory dissolved organic matter and it has been put there by a hitherto little-regarded group of creatures called aerobic anoxygenic photoheterotrophic bacteria (AAPB). If Dr Jiao is right, a whole new “sink” for carbon dioxide from the atmosphere has been discovered. Fist tap ProfGeo.

doomsday begins when a nuclear state goes hongry

probaway | A patriotic young man fighting off the vultures of world famine coming to steal the food he has brought forth from the earth with his honest labor and toil.

These are probable precursors to the Doomsday event:

1. The possession of an arsenal of A-bombs by one of the victim countries of famine.
2. A leadership that believes it has the right to use atomic weapons to obtain food.
3. A supporting population of people who feel dispossessed of a necessity like food.
4. An essential item, probably food, water or energy, becoming difficult to acquire.
5. A dearth of an essential like water for crops and even for personal use because of another country’s actions.
6. The price of food exceeding 80% of the income of most of a country’s people with associated thefts becoming commonplace.
7. A religious belief in the righteousness of killing other people to save ones friends.
8. A 50% worldwide shortfall of a major food crop — wheat, rice, corn, soybeans.
9. Major theft of food supplies at sea or on highways by organized groups.
10. State sponsored theft of another country’s water or food.

china's voyages to the bottom of the sea

Video - Chinese high-performance resource exploration submersible.

NYTimes | When three Chinese scientists plunged to the bottom of the South China Sea in a tiny submarine early this summer, they did more than simply plant their nation’s flag on the dark seabed.

The men, who descended more than two miles in a craft the size of a small truck, also signaled Beijing’s intention to take the lead in exploring remote and inaccessible parts of the ocean floor, which are rich in oil, minerals and other resources that the Chinese would like to mine. And many of those resources happen to lie in areas where China has clashed repeatedly with its neighbors over territorial claims.

After the flag planting, which was done in secret but recorded in a video, Beijing quickly turned the feat of technology into a show of bravado.

“It is a great achievement,” Liu Feng, director of the dives, was quoted as saying by China Daily, an English-language newspaper, which telegraphs government positions to the outside world.

The global seabed is littered with what experts say is trillions of dollars’ worth of mineral nodules as well as many objects of intelligence value: undersea cables carrying diplomatic communications, lost nuclear arms, sunken submarines and hundreds of warheads left over from missile tests.

While a single small craft cannot reel in all these treasures, it does put China in an excellent position to go after them.

“They’re in it for a penny and a pound,” said Don Walsh, a pioneer of deep-ocean diving who recently visited the submersible and its makers in China. “It’s a very deliberate program.”

The small craft that made the trip — named Jiaolong, after a mythical sea dragon — was unveiled publicly late last month after eight years of secretive development. It is designed to go deeper than any other in the world, giving China access to 99.8 percent of the ocean floor.

Technically, it is a submersible. These craft differ from submarines in their small size, their need for a mother ship on the surface, and their ability to dive extraordinarily far despite the darkness and the crushing pressures. The world has only a few.

Jiaolong is meant to go as deep as 7,000 meters, or 4.35 miles, edging out the current global leader. Japan’s Shinkai 6500 can go as deep as 6,500 meters, outperforming craft “all over the world,” according to its makers. Russia, France and the United States lag further behind in the game of going deep.

china's oil consumption THE western security threat

TheEconomicsofOilEmpire | At the current rates of growth of US and China oil imports and consumption, China's oil consumption will match US oil imports by '16-'17. China's oil imports and consumption will reach parity with the US by '21-'22, at which point the US and China will together consume 60% of peak global oil production (assuming 73-75M bbl/day) versus 37-38% today, leaving the rest of the world to adapt to receiving the remaining 40% (35-40% less than is received today).

However, at the same trend rates of imports and consumption, the US and China will consume 80% of global oil production by the late '20s to early '30s, leaving the rest of the world just 20% of supplies, and China is on track to consume the entire world's oil production by the '40s-'50s; needless to say, this cannot occur.

Assuming the US and China can secure the necessary oil (???), and that global oil production remains at the plateau since '04-'05 (???), the EU+, Latin America, and Africa will experience a decline in oil supplies/consumption of 35-70% over the next 10-20 years, i.e., 4-6% avg. annual decline over the period. (This does not include faster depletion and/or the higher price of oil reducing growth of demand and thus cutting further supplies/consumption for the EU, Latin America, and Africa.)

Growth of the modern oil-based global economy is simply no longer possible, especially not the 8-10% reported growth in China-Asia. The West faces an increasingly grave, winner-take-all, geopolitical and military end game for the remaining oil supplies, a growing share of which China must secure or face outright decline and eventual collapse.

Historically, such conditions have led to resource wars, and the larger the scale of resource scarcity and the ability of social and political units to mobilize military resources to secure the resources, the larger the scale of mass violence and destruction of human life, productive wealth, and the natural environment. Peak Oil compels us to risk destroying much of the world's resources and environment in order to save what is left for the West.

Peak Oil makes China's (and Asia's) unsustainable growth a national security threat to the West that exceeds that of the mythical Al Qaeda or Radical Islam.

theatre iran near term (TIRANNT)

globalresearch | The stockpiling and deployment of advanced weapons systems directed against Iran started in the immediate wake of the 2003 bombing and invasion of Iraq. From the outset, these war plans were led by the US, in liaison with NATO and Israel.

Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration identified Iran and Syria as the next stage of “the road map to war”. US military sources intimated that an aerial attack on Iran could involve a large scale deployment comparable to the US "shock and awe" bombing raids on Iraq in March 2003:

"American air strikes on Iran would vastly exceed the scope of the 1981 Israeli attack on the Osiraq nuclear center in Iraq, and would more resemble the opening days of the 2003 air campaign against Iraq.(See Globalsecurity )

"Theater Iran Near Term"

Code named by US military planners as TIRANNT, "Theater Iran Near Term", simulations of an attack on Iran were initiated in May 2003 "when modelers and intelligence specialists pulled together the data needed for theater-level (meaning large-scale) scenario analysis for Iran." ( (William Arkin, Washington Post, 16 April 2006).

The scenarios identified several thousand targets inside Iran as part of a "Shock and Awe" Blitzkrieg:

"The analysis, called TIRANNT, for "Theater Iran Near Term," was coupled with a mock scenario for a Marine Corps invasion and a simulation of the Iranian missile force. U.S. and British planners conducted a Caspian Sea war game around the same time. And Bush directed the U.S. Strategic Command to draw up a global strike war plan for an attack against Iranian weapons of mass destruction. All of this will ultimately feed into a new war plan for "major combat operations" against Iran that military sources confirm now [April 2006] exists in draft form.

... Under TIRANNT, Army and U.S. Central Command planners have been examining both near-term and out-year scenarios for war with Iran, including all aspects of a major combat operation, from mobilization and deployment of forces through postwar stability operations after regime change." (William Arkin, Washington Post, 16 April 2006)

Different "theater scenarios" for an all out attack on Iran had been contemplated: "The US army, navy, air force and marines have all prepared battle plans and spent four years building bases and training for "Operation Iranian Freedom". Admiral Fallon, the new head of US Central Command, has inherited computerized plans under the name TIRANNT (Theatre Iran Near Term)." (New Statesman, February 19, 2007)

In 2004, drawing upon the initial war scenarios under TIRANNT, Vice President Dick Cheney instructed USSTRATCOM to draw up a "contingency plan" of a large scale military operation directed against Iran "to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States" on the presumption that the government in Tehran would be behind the terrorist plot. The plan included the pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state:

"The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons. Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States. Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing—that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack—but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections." (Philip Giraldi, Deep Background,The American Conservative August 2005)

and now a word from fidel castro...,

The Atlantic | He said the Iranian government should understand the consequences of theological anti-Semitism. "This went on for maybe two thousand years," he said. "I don't think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews. I would say much more than the Muslims. They have been slandered much more than the Muslims because they are blamed and slandered for everything. No one blames the Muslims for anything." The Iranian government should understand that the Jews "were expelled from their land, persecuted and mistreated all over the world, as the ones who killed God. In my judgment here's what happened to them: Reverse selection. What's reverse selection? Over 2,000 years they were subjected to terrible persecution and then to the pogroms. One might have assumed that they would have disappeared; I think their culture and religion kept them together as a nation." He continued: "The Jews have lived an existence that is much harder than ours. There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust." I asked him if he would tell Ahmadinejad what he was telling me. "I am saying this so you can communicate it," he answered.

Castro went on to analyze the conflict between Israel and Iran. He said he understood Iranian fears of Israeli-American aggression and he added that, in his view, American sanctions and Israeli threats will not dissuade the Iranian leadership from pursuing nuclear weapons. "This problem is not going to get resolved, because the Iranians are not going to back down in the face of threats. That's my opinion," he said. He then noted that, unlike Cuba, Iran is a "profoundly religious country," and he said that religious leaders are less apt to compromise. He noted that even secular Cuba has resisted various American demands over the past 50 years.

We returned repeatedly in this first conversation to Castro's fear that a confrontation between the West and Iran could escalate into a nuclear conflict. "The Iranian capacity to inflict damage is not appreciated," he said. "Men think they can control themselves but Obama could overreact and a gradual escalation could become a nuclear war." I asked him if this fear was informed by his own experiences during the 1962 missile crisis, when the Soviet Union and the U.S. nearly went to war other over the presence of nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba (missiles installed at the invitation, of course, of Fidel Castro). I mentioned to Castro the letter he wrote to Khruschev, the Soviet premier, at the height of the crisis, in which he recommended that the Soviets consider launching a nuclear strike against the U.S. if the Americans attack Cuba. "That would be the time to think about liquidating such a danger forever through a legal right of self-defense," Castro wrote at the time.

I asked him, "At a certain point it seemed logical for you to recommend that the Soviets bomb the U.S. Does what you recommended still seem logical now?" He answered: "After I've seen what I've seen, and knowing what I know now, it wasn't worth it all."

harvest of anger

NYTimes | A cover of The Economist right after 9/11 declared: “The Day the World Changed.” It has, and not just at airports where several billion shoes have been removed. Nine years later a harvest of anger is in.

Burning books is a lousy idea. Heinrich Heine, the German poet, foresaw the worst early in the 19th century: “Where they burn books, in the end they will also burn people.” Less than a decade separated the Nazi book burning of 1933 from the crematoria of the Final Solution.

Terry Jones, the pastor of a small church in Florida, did well to heed history’s warnings — as well as the warnings of America’s top military commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus — and cancel his planned Koran burning to mark the ninth anniversary Saturday of Al Qaeda’s attack.

Images of Islam’s Holy Book in flames in northwest Gainesville would have enraged Muslims and become a powerful recruitment tool for the very jihadists who attempt to sanctify indiscriminate violence through selective references to the Koran.

Why, almost a decade from Mohammad Atta, with his parting call to “read the Holy Koran” and “remember all of the things God has promised for the martyrs,” has there been scant healing? Why is America now bitterly divided over plans to build a mosque and Islamic center in the immediate vicinity of ground zero, and Europeans almost equally split over the growing Muslim presence in their societies?

This is a sullen time. Only a spark, it seems, separates resentment from uprising.

Since returning to Europe recently, I’ve been struck by the venom in the air: a German Bundesbank board member lamenting the Muslim dilution of his nation in a best-selling book called “Germany Does Away with Itself;” the growing political clout of the Dutch rightist Geert Wilders who is expected in Manhattan Saturday to address an anti-mosque rally; a political climate that sees Turkey’s entry into the European Union receding, a Swiss ban on minarets and French and Belgian acrimony over the veil.

All this is happening as the American right seizes on the lower-Manhattan mosque plan to galvanize anti-Islamic sentiment — lurking despite the better social integration of U.S. Muslims — and cast the Democrats as soft on Shariah.

The Sept. 11 attacks, seen now with a little perspective, shattered America’s self-image. A continent-sized sanctuary, flanked by the shining waters of two oceans, was no longer. A hideous neologism, the “homeland,” was coined to describe a country that now needed vigilant protection from within and without. Two wars, one longer than any in the nation’s history, deepened the trauma.

While one America fought, another shopped until the debt-driven spree ended in mayhem; and, to their horror, Americans discovered they could no longer cushion their declining incomes by borrowing against the once rising — now crashing — assets of their homes. Their last coping mechanism had collapsed.

dormant german identity reasserts itself

NYTimes | Twenty years after reunification, Germany has come to terms with itself in a way that the postwar generation proclaimed would never be possible and Ms. Schlöndorff’s post-Berlin Wall generation finds completely natural.

The shift is evident on the airwaves, where German songs are staging a comeback against the dominance of American pop, and in best sellers about Goethe and Schiller or in discovering Germany by foot, by car and by train from the Bavarian Alps to the old Hanseatic ports on the Baltic Sea.

In Parliament, politicians have debated ending conscription, threatening the post-Nazi ideal of an army of ordinary citizens, as German soldiers fight in Afghanistan. Despite fears of rising income inequality, Germany’s economic engine is humming and unemployment has fallen significantly in the former East Germany.

And Chancellor Angela Merkel has led a bloc of countries fending off President Obama’s calls for stimulus spending to combat the economic crisis, certain that the world should follow Germany’s example of austerity.

German pride did not die after the country’s defeat in World War II. Instead, like Sleeping Beauty in the Brothers Grimm version of the folk tale, it only fell into a deep slumber. The country has now awakened, ready to celebrate its economic ingenuity, its cultural treasures and the unsullied stretches of its history.

As Germany embarks on this journey of self-discovery, the question is whether it will leave behind a European project which was built in no small measure on the nation’s postwar guilt and on its pocketbook.

“Maybe it’s our time again,” said Catherine Mendle, 25, a school social worker strolling the grounds and halls of the square glass and concrete Chancellery building on a recent afternoon as part of a government open house. A military band played in the background, and Mrs. Merkel signed autographs for curious visitors.

the man who divided germany

Der Spiegel | Rarely has a man influenced the German public discourse as much as Sarrazin has done with his book "Deutschland schafft sich ab" ("Germany Does Itself In"). In just two weeks, Germany has been hit by three waves of debate stemming from the tome.

Criticism bordering on revulsion dominated the first wave of the reaction. Politicians and opinion leaders condemned Sarrazin almost unanimously.

But then it slowly became apparent that many citizens agreed with Sarrazin. The publisher announced that, due to high demand, it was going to increase the book's initial printing to 250,000 copies. Furthermore, Internet forums and political events made it clear that Sarrazin -- a member of the center-left Social Democrats, which has initiated proceedings to throw him out of the party -- had broad public support. Many are saying he is right; or, even if he does make a mistake here and there, he isn't being treated fairly.

The following e-mail, for example, was received at Social Democratic Party (SPD) headquarters: "Sometimes I'm frustrated and even furious about the fact that, in today's Germany, it's no longer possible to speak your mind and call a spade a spade! This is the sort of thing I'm used to seeing in totalitarian countries." Suddenly Sarrazin seemed like a popular hero.

The third wave arrived in the middle of last week. Politicians have begun demanding that the political elite cease ignoring the fact that many in Germany support Sarrazin. Peter Hauk, head of the Christian Democratic Union's parliamentary group in the southern state of Baden-Württemberg, says: "Even if I don't share some of his views, he does address issues that our citizens are concerned about."

fareed zakaria on the perennial neurosis...,

CNN | The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, prompted the U.S. to take sensible security measures and launch a justified counterattack against al Qaeda, says analyst Fareed Zakaria. But he says they also led to an overreaction that continues today.

Zakaria argues the organization behind the attacks, al Qaeda, has been greatly diminished by the U.S. response to 9/11 and by growing opposition to the group in the Muslim world:

"All these trends have worked to further diminish the threat al Qaeda poses to us. We're in a strange situation where the right doesn't want to acknowledge it because it would suggest we don't need to be in quite this much of a war footing and ... the left seems reluctant to accept some of this because it suggests that, God forbid, George W. Bush might have done something right.

"As a result of our political dysfunction, we have lost the ability to have a rational conversation about 9/11," Zakaria said.

The author and host of CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS" spoke to CNN on Wednesday. Here is an edited transcript: Fist tap Arnach

the way an abhorrent system works...,

GrantLawrence | Food prices are rising again.

Food prices have soared in the past year, sparking fears that Britain’s most ­vulnerable families face a hard winter....(source)

They are rising throughout the world.

In fact there were food riots recently in Mozambique that resulted in the killing of 13 people. You might think that it is just the law of supply and demand at work in the world market. If there is too much food, the prices drop and the people can eat. When there is not enough food, the prices rise and people go hungry.

This sounds pretty reasonable except that it is nonsense.

The exorbitant prices for food, just like the exorbitant prices for gasoline, are pushed not by market forces of supply and demand but by speculation.

Author and activist Raj Patel addressed this issue recently on Democracy Now.

"...And again, this is—there’s nothing natural about these speculative bubbles. They’re very much human-generated, particularly since legislation in 1991 was waived as the result of lobbying by Goldman Sachs. You’ll see increasing levels of speculation in food and fuel, that creates these bubbles in prices. And a few people profit a great deal. In 2006, for example, Merrill Lynch estimated that speculation was causing commodity prices to rise 50 percent higher than if they were based on just supply and demand alone. So there’s a lot of money in these markets...."(source)

There are an estimated 1 billion people that are starving throughout the world. Food prices make the difference between life and death for those billion people. But there are just a very few elite that will make hundreds of billions of dollars in bankster bets on food. When they win the people starve. If the super financial elite lose big in their bets, the governments of the world bail them out.

If you really think about it, it is abhorrent. But this is the way an abhorrent system works.

they're made out of meat..,

Video - Based on a short story by Terry Bisson.

what is the role of bacteria in carcinogenesis?

Video - growth hormones and carcinogenesis.

JNCI | Radiation, chemicals, heredity, and viruses have all been linked to cancer. Although bacteria seem to be unlikely contributors to cancer, experts continue to look into their role in carcinogenesis.

In his book, Can Bacteria Cause Cancer?, David Hess, Ph.D., a professor and chair of the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Renesselear Polytechnic Institute, Albany, suggests that bacterial theories of cancer development have been largely overlooked.

Helicobacter pylori was isolated from the human stomach for the first time in 1982. The bacterium can cause stomach ulcers, and those who are infected are more likely to develop stomach cancer. Some health organizations estimate that more than one half of the world is infected with the organism.

The H. pylori–stomach cancer link is one of the few accepted connections between cancer and bacteria. However, Hess argues that bacterial theories related to cancer may not have been given proper consideration.

“I am not a microbiologist and I don’t claim that there is an established relationship, but I can offer an historical perspective on the issue,” Hess said in an interview. “I think it is fair to say that the older attempts to find a single bacterial agent represent a rejected program. However, with emerging linkages between H. pylori and cancer, the research field may be reopening.

“If you look back in the history of science, a number of chronic diseases have been linked to bacteria, so it is not entirely unreasonable to wonder if the long history of clinical findings of bacteria associated with tumor samples or the blood of cancer patients suggests an overlooked pathogenic role.”

Hess added that bacterial advocates were largely ignored because emerging trends favored today’s conventional therapies and because of the extreme nature of some bacterial theories.

“There is good evidence that the bacterial theories and therapies were pushed aside by the emerging trends in support of the chemotherapy and radiation therapy,” said Hess. “There was also evidence that advocates overstated their case by claiming that a single, pleomorphic bacterium caused all cancers.”

However, with the acceptance of H. pylori as a cause of stomach cancer, more doctors and researchers are studying other cancer and bacteria connections.

"altruistic" antibiotic resistance...,

WorldScience | Confronting at­tack by an­ti­bi­otics, some bac­te­ria help each oth­er out—and un­for­tu­nately for us, they’re bet­ter off for it, re­search­ers have found.

Though a small frac­tion of pathogens in a col­o­ny may have evolved the abil­ity to re­sist a drug or class of drugs, these “su­per bugs” were found to help their more vul­ner­a­ble peers by over-pro­duc­ing a drug-fighting sub­stance.

Pre­vail­ing wis­dom held that an­ti­bi­ot­ic re­sistance works only on an in­di­vid­ual lev­el: a bac­te­ri­um ac­quires a muta­t­ion that con­fers pro­tec­tion against a drug, al­low­ing it to sur­vive and re­pro­duce. Even­tu­al­ly, as vul­ner­a­ble bac­te­ria die, the mu­tan­t's stronger prog­e­ny re­pop­u­late the col­o­ny. This basically reflects how evolution is believed to work in all species: mem­bers that are “fit­ter” or bet­ter adapt­ed to pre­vail­ing con­di­tions spread their genes through the po­pu­lation at the ex­pense of other mem­bers.

But the new stu­dy, to ap­pear in the Sept. 2 is­sue of the re­search jour­nal Na­ture, in­di­cates there are al­so popula­t­ion-wide changes in the bac­te­ri­al com­mun­ity at work. Faced with an on­slaught of an­ti­bi­otics, re­sistant Esch­e­rich­i­chia coli mi­crobes pro­duce—at an en­er­gy cost to them­selves—a pro­tein mol­e­cule that seeps in­to the com­munal broth and trig­gers a slew of pro­tec­tive mech­a­nisms in their non-re­sistant neigh­bors.

The study comes from re­search­ers at the How­ard Hughes Med­i­cal In­sti­tute in Chevy Chase, Md.

gene networks underlie disease?

The Scientist | "It is an important discovery," said Constantin Polychronakos, an endocrinologist at the McGill University Health Center who was not involved in the study. "Instead of looking at individual genes and trying to make sense out of it, they were looking at whole networks of genes."

Many common diseases have an exceedingly complex genetic architecture, with a multitude of genes interacting with each other and the environment to result in disease. Genome-wide association (GWA) studies, however, a widely-used method for unraveling the genetic underpinnings of disease, focus on the incredibly small portion of the DNA -- the less than 1 percent of the genome that varies among individuals. This approach identifies genetic variants that seem to be associated with particular diseases, but these variants often play only a minor role in the development of disease, and their physiological effects remain largely unknown.

"You have a relationship between a genetic variant and the associated disease, but you don't really know what it's doing," explained Norbert Hubner, a geneticist at Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) in Berlin and one of the authors of the paper.

Hubner and his colleagues examined seven different rat tissues for individual variations in the expression levels of various transcription factors. Then, using a predictive statistical approach, they could identify which gene variants likely led to those differences in transcription factor expression.

They identified one particular transcription factor that they decided to investigate further. Interferon regulatory factor 7 (IRF7) was active in the majority of the rat tissues studied and is known to be a key regulator of inflammatory processes. It seemed to be the central player of a network of more than 300 genes involved in inflammatory processes and which appeared to be active in macrophages -- immune cells known to be critical participants in inflammation and the development of autoimmune disorders -- as as well as their precursors, monocytes. The team thus dubbed this network IRF7-driven inflammatory network, or IDIN for short.

To determine whether a similar network was operating in human monocytes, the researchers used previously collected data on gene expression and GWA studies in humans to identify an analogous network.

"We found the same network in both human populations [we looked at]," said coauthor Enrico Petretto, a computational biologist at Imperial College London. "There was very significant overlap between rats and humans." Notably, many of the human genes were known factors in type 1 diabetes (T1D).

the secret history of psychedelic psychiatry

Video - American military LSD experiment.

Neurophilosophy | ON August 15th, 1951, an outbreak of hallucinations, panic attacks and psychotic episodes swept through the town of Saint-Pont-Esprit in southern France, hospitalizing dozens of its inhabitants and leaving five people dead. Doctors concluded that the incident occurred because bread in one of the town's bakeries had been contaminated with ergot, a toxic fungus that grows on rye. But according to investigative journalist Hank Albarelli, the CIA had actually dosed the bread with d-lysergic acid diethylamide-25 (LSD), an extremely potent hallucinogenic drug derived from ergot, as part of a mind control research project.

Although we may never learn the truth behind the events at Saint-Pont-Esprit, it is now well known that the United States Army experimented with LSD on willing and unwilling military personnel and civilians. Less well known is the work of a group of psychiatrists working in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, who pioneered the use of LSD as a treatment for alcoholism, and claimed that it produced unprecedented rates of recovery. Their findings were soon brushed under the carpet, however, and research into the potential therapeutic effects of psychedelics was abruptly halted in the late 1960s, leaving a promising avenue of research unexplored for some 40 years.

The secret history of psychedelic psychiatry began in the early 1950s, about 10 years after Albert Hofmann discovered the hallucinogenic properties of LSD, and lasted until 1970. It was uncovered by medical historian Erika Dyck, who examined the archives from Canadian mental health researchers and conducted interviews with some of the psychiatrists, patients and nurses involved in the early LSD trials. Dyck's work shows early LSD experimentation in a new light, as a fruitful branch of mainstream psychiatric research: it redefined alcoholism as a disease that could be cured and played a role in the psychopharmacological revolution which radically transformed psychiatry. But, despite some encouraging results, it was cut short prematurely.

shrooms ease end-of-life anxiety...,

CNN | Terminally ill cancer patients struggling with anxiety may get some relief from a guided "trip" on the hallucinogenic drug psilocybin, a new study suggests.

The study included 12 patients who took a small dose of psilocybin -- the active ingredient in "magic mushrooms" -- while under the supervision of trained therapists. In a separate session, the participants took a placebo pill, which had little effect on their symptoms.

By contrast, one to three months after taking psilocybin the patients reported feeling less anxious and their overall mood had improved. By the six-month mark, the group's average score on a common scale used to measure depression had declined by 30 percent, according to the study, which was published in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

Psychiatrists and psychologists began exploring the effects of hallucinogens on the mood and anxiety of dying patients in the 1950s, but the research stopped abruptly when psilocybin, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), and other mind-altering drugs were outlawed in the 1970s.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a handful of small studies involving hallucinogens since the 1990s, but the field is still emerging.

Grob's study is the first of its kind in more than 35 years. It was funded by private foundations and the Heffter Research Institute, a nonprofit organization based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, that has been a major sponsor of the second-generation hallucinogen research.

fallujah's cancer catastrophe

Video - woman throws cat into dumpster.

MediaLens | Whereas the story of the maltreated cat received heavy coverage for almost one week across the UK media, we (and activist friends in the United States) can find exactly one mention of the Fallujah cancer and infant mortality study in the entire UK and US national press - Patrick Cockburn’s article in the Independent. The story has simply been ignored by every other US-UK national newspaper.

The study +has+ been reported elsewhere. Cockburn’s piece was reprinted in The Hamilton Spectator in Ontario, Canada on July 24 and in the July 25 Sunday Tribune in Ireland. The July 27 Frontier Post in Pakistan ran an excellent piece on the US military’s use of depleted uranium in several theatres of war, including Fallujah. So did the July 30 Irish News. The August 3 edition of New Nation in Bangladesh also covered the issue. It is much more difficult for us to assess TV and radio performance. To its credit, the BBC did give the story some attention.

The destruction of Fallujah is only one small item on an almost unbelievable list of horrors heaped by the United States and Britain on Iraq - crimes that are rarely considered individually and almost never as a whole. Readers might like to consider how often they can recall the mainstream media summing up the recent history of Iraq in the way that US dissident writer Bill Blum did last week:

"... no American should be allowed to forget that the nation of Iraq, the society of Iraq, have been destroyed, ruined, a failed state. The Americans, beginning 1991, bombed for 12 years, with one excuse or another; then invaded, then occupied, overthrew the government, killed wantonly, tortured ... the people of that unhappy land have lost everything — their homes, their schools, their electricity, their clean water, their environment, their neighborhoods, their mosques, their archaeology, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their state-run enterprises, their physical health, their mental health, their health care, their welfare state, their women's rights, their religious tolerance, their safety, their security, their children, their parents, their past, their present, their future, their lives ...

“More than half the population either dead, wounded, traumatized, in prison, internally displaced, or in foreign exile ... The air, soil, water, blood and genes drenched with depleted uranium ... the most awful birth defects ... unexploded cluster bombs lie in wait for children to pick them up ... an army of young Islamic men went to Iraq to fight the American invaders; they left the country more militant, hardened by war, to spread across the Middle East, Europe and Central Asia ... a river of blood runs alongside the Euphrates and Tigris ... through a country that may never be put back together again."

Mainstream journalists see things differently. The BBC’s correspondent Paul Wood reported from Iraq in June 2005:

“After everything that’s happened in Fallujah, the Americans aren’t going to find an +unambiguous+ welcome. But Fallujah +is+ more peaceful than it’s been in a long time. Its people like that.”

targetted cancer treatment?

PNAS | Cancer cells are characterized by genetic mutations that deregulate cell proliferation and suppress cell death. To arrest the uncontrolled replication of malignant cells, conventional chemotherapies systemically disrupt cell division, causing diverse and often severe side effects as a result of collateral damage to normal cells. Seeking to address this shortcoming, we pursue therapeutic regulation that is conditional, activating selectively in cancer cells. This functionality is achieved using small conditional RNAs that interact and change conformation to mechanically transduce between detection of a cancer mutation and activation of a therapeutic pathway. Here, we describe small conditional RNAs that undergo hybridization chain reactions (HCR) to induce cell death via an innate immune response if and only if a cognate mRNA cancer marker is detected within a cell. The sequences of the small conditional RNAs can be designed to accept different mRNA markers as inputs to HCR transduction, providing a programmable framework for selective killing of diverse cancer cells. In cultured human cancer cells (glioblastoma, prostate carcinoma, Ewing’s sarcoma), HCR transduction mediates cell death with striking efficacy and selectivity, yielding a 20- to 100-fold reduction in population for cells containing a cognate marker, and no measurable reduction otherwise. Our results indicate that programmable mechanical transduction with small conditional RNAs represents a fundamental principle for exploring therapeutic conditional regulation in living cells.