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.

when quantitative easing has run its course and fails

GlobalResearch | Readers of my articles will recall that I have warned as far back as December 2006, that the global banks will collapse when the Financial Tsunami hits the global economy in 2007. And as they say, the rest is history.

Quantitative Easing (QE I) spearheaded by the Chairman of Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke delayed the inevitable demise of the fiat shadow money banking system slightly over 18 months.

That is why in November of 2009, I was so confident to warn my readers that by the end of the first quarter of 2010 at the earliest or by the second quarter of 2010 at the latest, the global economy will go into a tailspin. The recent alarm that the US economy has slowed down and in the words of Bernanke “the recent pace of growth is less vigorous than we expected” has all but vindicated my analysis. He warned that the outlook is uncertain and the economy “remains vulnerable to unexpected developments”.

Obviously, Bernanke’s words do not reveal the full extent of the fear that has gripped central bankers and the financial elites that assembled at the annual gathering at Jackson Hole, Wyoming. But, you can take it from me that they are very afraid.

Why?

Let me be plain and blunt. The “unexpected developments” Bernanke referred to is the collapse of the global banks. This is FED speak and to those in the loop, this is the dire warning.

So many renowned economists have misdiagnosed the objective and consequences of quantitative easing. Central bankers’ scribes and the global mass media hoodwinked the people by saying that QE will enable the banks to lend monies to cash-starved companies and jump start the economy. The low interest rate regime would encourage all and sundry to borrow, consume and invest.

This was the fairy tale.

Then, there were some economists who were worried that as a result of the FED’s printing press (electronic or otherwise) working overtime, hyper-inflation would set in soon after.

But nothing happened. The multiplier effect of fractional reserve banking did not take off. Bank lending in fact stalled.

Why?

What happened?

Let me explain in simple terms step by step.

the true cost of the Iraq war: $3 trillion and beyond

WaPo | Writing in these pages in early 2008, we put the total cost to the United States of the Iraq war at $3 trillion. This price tag dwarfed previous estimates, including the Bush administration's 2003 projections of a $50 billion to $60 billion war.

But today, as the United States ends combat in Iraq, it appears that our $3 trillion estimate (which accounted for both government expenses and the war's broader impact on the U.S. economy) was, if anything, too low. For example, the cost of diagnosing, treating and compensating disabled veterans has proved higher than we expected.

Moreover, two years on, it has become clear to us that our estimate did not capture what may have been the conflict's most sobering expenses: those in the category of "might have beens," or what economists call opportunity costs. For instance, many have wondered aloud whether, absent the Iraq invasion, we would still be stuck in Afghanistan. And this is not the only "what if" worth contemplating. We might also ask: If not for the war in Iraq, would oil prices have risen so rapidly? Would the federal debt be so high? Would the economic crisis have been so severe?

The answer to all four of these questions is probably no. The central lesson of economics is that resources -- including both money and attention -- are scarce. What was devoted to one theater, Iraq, was not available elsewhere.

does our economy really have to run on fraud?

Video - Angelides financial crisis inquiry commission spoof.

CounterPunch | What is the difference between today’s economy and Lehman Brothers just before it collapsed in September 2008? Should Lehman, the economy, Wall Street – or none of the above – be bailed out of bad mortgage debt? How did the Fed and Treasury decide which Wall Street firms to save – and how do they decide whether or not to save U.S. companies, personal mortgage debtors, states and cities from bankruptcy and insolvency today? Why did it start by saving the richest financial institutions, leaving the “real” economy locked in debt deflation?

Stated another way, why was Lehman the only Wall Street firm permitted to go under? How does the logic that Washington used in its case compare to how it is treating the economy at large? Why bail out Wall Street – whose managers are rich enough not to need to spend their gains – and not the quarter of U.S. homeowners unfortunate enough also to suffer “negative equity” but not qualify for the help that the officials they elect gave to Wall Street’s winners by enabling Bear Stearns, A.I.G., Countrywide Financial and other gamblers to pay their bad debts?

There was disagreement last Wednesday at the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission now plodding along through its post mortem hearings on the causes of Wall Street’s autumn 2008 collapse and ensuing bailout. Federal Reserve economists argue that the economy – and Wall Street firms apart from Lehman – merely had a liquidity problem, a temporary failure to find buyers for its junk mortgages. By contrast, Lehman had a more deep-seated “balance sheet” problem: negative equity. A taxpayer bailout would have been an utter waste, not recoverable.

Video - How has the geography of religion evolved over the centuries, and where has it sparked wars? Our map gives us a brief history of the world's most well-known religions: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism. Selected periods of inter-religious bloodshed are also highlighted. Want to see 5,000 years of religion in 90 seconds? Ready, Set, Go!

take the evolution challenge

Big Questions | It has become my passion to expand evolutionary theory beyond the biological sciences to include all things human. Many people are puzzled about why this is necessary. After all, an enormous body of knowledge about humanity has accumulated without reference to evolution. Why is an evolutionary perspective needed now when it wasn’t needed in the past?

You’ve heard of the Pepsi Challenge. I now invite people who ask this question to take the Evolution Challenge. In one cup, place any given body of knowledge that has developed about our species without reference to evolution. In a second cup, place the same body of knowledge viewed from an evolutionary perspective. Take a sip of both. If they taste exactly the same, then the evolutionary perspective merely rediscovers what is already known. If they taste different, then the evolutionary perspective has added something new — perhaps a reorganization of existing knowledge, a new set of questions, the identification of false claims, or the integration of knowledge across disciplines for a more cosmopolitan flavor.

Consider modern economics, which is dominated by a view of human nature called rational choice theory, often called Homo economicus as if it were a proper description of a species. According to rational choice theory, people are entirely self-regarding in their preferences and very smart about achieving their goals. Even if they do not consciously “maximize their utilities,” as the economists put it, they behave in a way that amounts to the same thing. When pressed to explain why Homo economicus has this particular set of preferences and abilities, economists must rely upon a genetic and/or cultural evolutionary account, even if they seldom make it explicit. They suggest that people who failed to maximize their utilities were not among our ancestors. Barring a reliance on special creation, what else can they say?

As it happens, Homo economicus is a patently false description of our species, as we have learned to our sorrow from the disastrous policies derived from rational choice theory. It is not the case that economists converged on an accurate conception of human nature without using the E-word and that taking an evolutionary perspective merely rediscovers what is already known. The evolution cup tastes completely different from the rational choice cup (as I recount in a series of posts on my Evolution for Everyone blog). Rational choice theory is inspired by Newtonian physics and is devoid of such flesh-and-blood attributes as sympathy, a sense of fairness, and norms.

eonomics and evolution as different paradigms

Video - An Ecological Approach to Stopping Fundamentalism.

Scienceblogs | So far I have shown that Homo economicus, the conception of human nature imagined by rational choice theory, is a far cry from the real thing. Moreover, it stubbornly refuses to gravitate toward the real thing, even when its shortcomings are made glaringly apparent. This might seem pathological, but only when we adopt a naïve conception of science as smoothly converging upon the truth. When we take seriously the concepts of paradigms from philosophy of science, multiple local equilibria from complex systems theory, and multiple adaptive peaks from evolutionary theory, then stasis, or an incapacity for change, is something that we should expect (see E&E I).

For over half a century, Milton Friedman's argument that Homo economicus doesn't need to resemble the real thing to be predictive has helped to maintain the dominance of rational choice theory. That argument has now failed in two ways. First, rational choice theory isn't as predictive as it needs to be to formulate successful policy. Second, Friedman's basic argument counts as an example of naïve adaptationism of the sort criticized by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Leowontin in their famous "Spandrels" paper written in 1979, as I show in E&E III. The fact that these two classic papers have never (to my knowledge) been related to each other says it all about economics and evolution as different paradigms, the overarching theme of this series.

There should be universal agreement on the need to base economic theory and policy on a more accurate conception of human nature--on Homo sapiens, not Homo economicus. That is the rallying cry of a new breed of economics called behavioral economics, which originated in the 1970's and has become widely known through bestsellers such as Nudge: Improving Decisions About Wealth, Health, and Happiness by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions, by Dan Ariely, and Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism, by George Akerloff and Robert Shiller.

everything else is merely conversation....,

NYTimes | Dr. Venter, now 63, made his name as a gene hunter. He was co-founder of a company, Celera Genomics, that nearly left the federally funded Human Genome Project in the dust in the race to determine the complete sequence of DNA in human chromosomes. He garnered admiration for some path-breaking ideas but also the enmity of some scientific rivals who viewed him as a publicity seeker who was polluting a scientific endeavor with commercialism.

Now Dr. Venter is turning from reading the genetic code to an even more audacious goal: writing it. At Synthetic Genomics, he wants to create living creatures — bacteria, algae or even plants — that are designed from the DNA up to carry out industrial tasks and displace the fuels and chemicals that are now made from fossil fuels.

“Designing and building synthetic cells will be the basis of a new industrial revolution,” Dr. Venter says. “The goal is to replace the entire petrochemical industry.”

is humanity prepared for the worst?

Video - Dr. strangelove survival plan.

Guardian | Designer viruses, potent new weapons, hurtling asteroids... all have the potential to obliterate humanity. So how do scientists plan for such catastrophes? Scientists have good reason to be weary of fanciful speculation over the safety of their experiments, but some academics claim there are valuable lessons to be learned from the LHC experience, ones that could save us from more realistic catastrophes before the century is out. Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, says that advances in fields such as weapons technology, artificial intelligence and synthetic biology (which has already given researchers the tools to create viruses from scratch) could lead to what he calls "existential threats". These are catastrophes that play out on an unprecedented scale, ones that have the potential to bring an end to the human story, either by wiping us out completely, or by "permanently and drastically destroying our future potential".

The creation of a lethal synthetic virus that kills on a global scale is but one potential risk that Bostrom highlights. Breakthroughs in physics could lead to new weapons that increase the dangers of war, he says, while advances in computing could see the advent of machines that can improve their own intelligence, and surpass that of humans. Even attempts to manipulate the atmosphere to combat global warming might backfire and trigger a global disaster.

Bostrom says the LHC should be seen as a test case, used by society to learn how to deal with events and technologies that may genuinely threaten our existence in the future. "So far, we haven't done very well, but events surrounding the LHC could stimulate us into getting our act together for next time, when the threats need to be taken more seriously," he says. "I think the danger from particle accelerators is extremely small, but there will be other areas that will cause major existential risks and we need to learn how to deal with these situations in a rational way."

Existential threats are nothing new. Schoolchildren learn that an asteroid strike wiped out three quarters of Earth's species 65m years ago and promptly ended the reign of the dinosaurs. There have been at least four other mass extinctions, each one the result of an epic natural disaster. The point that intrigues researchers such as Bostrom is that society is bad at identifying dangers such as these, and even worse at preparing for them. In an essay published in the Journal of Evolution and Technology in 2002, Bostrom expressed dismay at how little research has been done on serious threats to humanity, writing: "There is more scholarly work on the life-habits of the dung fly than on existential risks." Little has changed since, he says.

religious outlier

god vs. logic

Video - God vs. Logic.

Vanity Fair | What’s an atheist to think when thousands of believers (including prominent rabbis and priests) are praying for his survival and salvation—while others believe his cancer was divinely inspired, and hope that he burns in hell?

Who else feels Christopher Hitchens getting terminal throat cancer [sic] was God’s revenge for him using his voice to blaspheme him? Atheists like to ignore FACTS. They like to act like everything is a “coincidence”. Really? It’s just a “coincidence” [that] out of any part of his body, Christopher Hitchens got cancer in the one part of his body he used for blasphemy? Yea, keep believing that Atheists. He’s going to writhe in agony and pain and wither away to nothing and then die a horrible agonizing death, and THEN comes the real fun, when he’s sent to HELLFIRE forever to be tortured and set afire.

There are numerous passages in holy scripture and religious tradition that for centuries made this kind of gloating into a mainstream belief. Long before it concerned me particularly I had understood the obvious objections. First, which mere primate is so damn sure that he can know the mind of god? Second, would this anonymous author want his views to be read by my unoffending children, who are also being given a hard time in their way, and by the same god? Third, why not a thunderbolt for yours truly, or something similarly awe-inspiring? The vengeful deity has a sadly depleted arsenal if all he can think of is exactly the cancer that my age and former “lifestyle” would suggest that I got. Fourth, why cancer at all? Almost all men get cancer of the prostate if they live long enough: it’s an undignified thing but quite evenly distributed among saints and sinners, believers and unbelievers. If you maintain that god awards the appropriate cancers, you must also account for the numbers of infants who contract leukemia. Devout persons have died young and in pain. Bertrand Russell and Voltaire, by contrast, remained spry until the end, as many psychopathic criminals and tyrants have also done. These visitations, then, seem awfully random. While my so far uncancerous throat, let me rush to assure my Christian correspondent above, is not at all the only organ with which I have blasphemed …And even if my voice goes before I do, I shall continue to write polemics against religious delusions, at least until it’s hello darkness my old friend. In which case, why not cancer of the brain? As a terrified, half-aware imbecile, I might even scream for a priest at the close of business, though I hereby state while I am still lucid that the entity thus humiliating itself would not in fact be “me.” (Bear this in mind, in case of any later rumors or fabrications.)

islamization of paris? a warning to the west?

Video - Maxime Lapante Islamization of Paris video.

CBN | Friday in Paris. A hidden camera shows streets blocked by huge crowds of Muslim worshippers and enforced by a private security force.

This is all illegal in France: the public worship, the blocked streets, and the private security. But the police have been ordered not to intervene.

It shows that even though some in the French government want to get tough with Muslims and ban the burqa, other parts of the French government continue to give Islam a privileged status.

An ordinary French citizen who has been watching the Islamization of Paris decided that the world needed to see what was happening to his city. He used a hidden camera to start posting videos on YouTube. His life has been threatened and so he uses the alias of "Maxime Lepante. "

Lepante's View

His camera shows that Muslims "are blocking the streets with barriers. They are praying on the ground. And the inhabitants of this district cannot leave their homes, nor go into their homes during those prayers."

"The Muslims taking over those streets do not have any authorization. They do not go to the police headquarters, so it's completely illegal," he says.

The Muslims in the street have been granted unofficial rights that no Christian group is likely to get under France's Laicite', or secularism law.

"It says people have the right to share any belief they want, any religion," Lepante explained. "But they have to practice at home or in the mosque, synagogues, churches and so on."

Some say Muslims must pray in the street because they need a larger mosque. But Lepante has observed cars coming from other parts of Paris, and he believes it is a weekly display of growing Muslim power.

"They are coming there to show that they can take over some French streets to show that they can conquer a part of the French territory," he said.

shomrim

NYTimes | On Thursday night in Brooklyn, a suspect was chased and quickly surrounded by a group of patrolmen in blue uniform jackets who ordered him to halt.

The man, David Flores, 33, who witnesses say was fondling himself in front of children in a Hasidic section of Brooklyn known as Borough Park, was about to be caught by the men in blue. He began shooting at the men, all unarmed, with a .22-caliber handgun, the authorities said, hitting and wounding four before being tackled.

Although these streets are in the jurisdiction of the New York Police Department — the 66th Precinct — these patrolmen were not police officers. In fact, two were bakers, one was a dry cleaner and the fourth sells insurance.

They were volunteers with the Brooklyn South Safety Patrol, a licensed, unarmed civilian group. They wore blue jackets with emblems, but they also wore skull caps and had forelocks of the Hasidic. They yelled in Yiddish as chaos erupted about 8 p.m. on 49th Street between 9th and 10th Avenues.

Within minutes, the area was swarming with patrol members, who roped off the area with yellow crime scene tape — marked “shomrim,” a word derived from the Hebrew word for guards.

While few outside the community are familiar with the group, the shooting cast a spotlight on it and its role on the streets. There are similar groups in Brooklyn’s three other ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods: Williamsburg, Crown Heights and Flatbush.

In Borough Park, the patrol members are as natural a sight as men in black coats and hats. Many area residents are more likely to call the patrol’s hot line number than 911.

The calls go to the Brooklyn shomrim communications center — a phone in a truck tire repair shop owned by Sam and Mendy Rosenberg. The brothers go from fixing tires to answering about 100 calls a day and then dispatching shomrim responders by radio.

“We have a faster response than the police, about a minute and a half,” said Mendy Rosenberg, his big hands and mechanic’s outfit smeared with grease. If a suspect is trying to escape by car, he can call upon hundreds of people to block streets and bridge entrances.