Bigfoot is Real

This is a decade old article and it is timely, as it displays the show evolution of scientific acceptance.  Today we are in possession of detailed DNA information that makes this creature not only real but also part human in terms of its ancestry.

A key point is that science is slowly beginning to pay attention.

My own experience began in the mid nineties when I decide to simply go through the available data to see were it led.  It led to a fresh understanding of a proper theoretical foundation for scientific method as well as a powerful case for the reality of Big Foot.  What in fact came out is that with enough data, a surprisingly clear picture will emerge from which testable inferences and questions may be drawn to be confirmed by later sightings.

I then applied the method to what is turning out to be a host of curious data points on other creatures begging for something other that lazy dismissal.  It turns out that Nessie is odd and unique until you discover hundreds of conforming lakes throughout the Northern and Southern Hemispheres all happily general their own local version of the tale.  Again all the data is local and the observers are alone unique while the necessary conditions are common but often outside human interaction.

In the meantime far too many scientists are asked for opinions that they have no right to provide.  Unfortunately too many do opine instead of stating that the data is insufficient and they personally do not care which would be an exact truth.

The Bigfoot phenomenon has now entered a state in which contact has become both plausible and possible.  It will be possible to speak to them.  We need some young researchers to pull a Jane Goodall project.  Several excellent targets now exist.

We even have all the necessary hardware to assist.

Bigfoot Is Real

Stefan Lovgren

National Geographic News

October 23, 2003

http://frontiersofzoology.blogspot.ca/2012/12/forensic-expert-says-bigfoot-is-real.html

It's been the subject of campfire stories for decades. A camera-elusive, grooming-challenged, bipedal ape-man that roams the mountain regions of North America. Some call it Sasquatch. Others know it as Bigfoot.Thousands of people claim to have seen the hairy hominoid, but the evidence of its existence is fuzzy. There are few clear photographs of the oversized beast. No bones have ever been found. Countless pranksters have admitted to faking footprints. 

Yet a small but vociferous number of scientists remain undeterred. Risking ridicule from other academics, they propose that there's enough forensic evidence to warrant something that has never been done: a comprehensive, scientific study to determine if the legendary primate actually exists.

"Given the scientific evidence that I have examined, I'm convinced there's a creature out there that is yet to be identified," said Jeff Meldrum, a professor of anatomy and anthropology at Idaho State University in Pocatello.

Thousands of Sightings

Sasquatch stories go back centuries. Tales of mythical giant apes lurk in the oral traditions of most Native American tribes, as well as in Europe and Asia. The Himalaya has its Abominable Snowman, or the Yeti. In Australia, Bigfoot is known as the Yowie Man.Bigfoot advocates hypothesize that the primate is the offspring of an ape from Asia that wandered to North America during the Ice Age. They believe there are at least 2,000 ape men walking upright in North America's woods today.An adult male is said to be at least 8 feet (2.4 meters) tall, weigh 800 pounds (360 kilograms), and have feet twice the size of a human's. The creatures are described as shy and nocturnal, and their diets consist mostly of berries and fruits.Matt Moneymaker had been searching for Bigfoot for years. In the woods of eastern Ohio, he claims he finally came eye to eye with the elusive primate."It was 2 o'clock in the morning and the moon was a quarter full," recalled Moneymaker. "Suddenly, there he was, an eight-foot-tall creature, standing 15 feet away, growling at me. He wanted to let me know I was in the wrong place."Moneymaker, who lives in Dana Point in southern California, is a lawyer who runs his own marketing agency. In his spare time, he leads the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, a network of more than 3,000 people who claim to have seen the Sasquatch.Unfortunately, no one has been able to snap a clear picture of the beast.

Perhaps the most compelling photographic evidence of Bigfoot is a controversial short film shot by Roger Patterson in 1967, which appears to document a female Bigfoot striding along a riverbank in northern California.

"It certainly wasn't human"

Now, Bigfoot advocates are increasingly turning to forensic evidence to prove the existence of the giant creature.

Investigator Jimmy Chilcutt of the Conroe Police Department in Texas, who specializes in finger- and footprints, has analyzed the more than 150 casts of Bigfoot prints that Meldrum, the Idaho State professor, keeps in a laboratory.Chilcutt says one footprint found in 1987 in Walla Walla in Washington State has convinced him that Bigfoot is real."The ridge flow pattern and the texture was completely different from anything I've ever seen," he said. "It certainly wasn't human, and of no known primate that I've examined. The print ridges flowed lengthwise along the foot, unlike human prints, which flow across. The texture of the ridges was about twice the thickness of a human, which indicated that this animal has a real thick skin."Meldrum, meanwhile, says a 400-pound (180-kilogram) block of plaster known as the Skookum Cast provides further evidence of Bigfoot's existence. The cast was made in September 2000 from an impression of a large animal that had apparently lain down on its side to retrieve some fruit next to a mud hole in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in Washington State. Meldrum says the cast contains recognizable impressions of a forearm, a thigh, buttocks, an Achilles tendon and heel. "It's 40 to 50 percent bigger than a normal human," he said. "The anatomy doesn't jive with any known animal."A few academics believe Meldrum could be right.Renowned chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall last year surprised an interviewer from National Public Radio when she said she was sure that large, undiscovered primates, such as the Yeti or Sasquatch, exist.

The Skeptics

But the vast majority of scientists still believe Bigfoot is little more than supermarket tabloid fodder. They wonder why no Bigfoot has ever been captured, dead or alive."The bottom line is, they don't have a body," said Michael Dennett, who writes for Skeptical Inquirer magazine and who has followed the Bigfoot debate for 20 years.Bigfoot buffs note that it's rare to find a carcass of a grizzly bear in the wild. While that's true, grizzlies have not escaped photographic documentation.Hair samples that have been recovered from alleged Bigfoot encounters have turned out to come from elk, bears or cows.Many of the sightings and footprints, meanwhile, have proved to be hoaxes.After Bigfoot tracker Ray Wallace died in a California nursing home last year, his children finally announced that their prank-loving dad had created the modern myth of Bigfoot when he used a pair of carved wooden feet to create a track of giant footprints in a northern California logging camp in 1958.Dennett says he's not surprised by the flood of Bigfoot sightings."It's the same kind of eyewitness reports we see for the Loch Ness Sea Monster, UFOs, ghosts, you name it," he said. "The monster thing is a universal product of the human mind. We hear such stories from around the world."

Cancer Communication Breakthgrough

This is unexpected. Everyone thought that an errant cell took of and spread by multiplying. How about simply converting neighbors as well if not mostly. The way cancer does spread is quick and this trick makes that process possible as well as its rapid spread in the body.

The hard question is to actually stop the process itself to also stall the growth and spreading behavior in its tracks. Not as satisfactory as an outright cure but it would still work very well in saving lives.

In the meantime we have a major new research avenue.

Canadian scientists discover how cancer cells communicate with healthy cells in major breakthrough

Sheryl Ubelacker, Canadian Press | Dec 21, 2012

http://life.nationalpost.com/2012/12/21/canadian-scientists-discover-how-cancer-cells-communicate-with-healthy-cells-in-major-breakthrough/

TORONTO — Canadian scientists have made a major discovery about how cancer spreads: tumour cells appear to co-opt normal cells around them, in effect “talking” them into helping the cancer set up shop in other parts of the body.

The process, called metastasis, is what often makes malignancies so challenging to treat — and typically more deadly.

“People often think of cancer as this separate tissue, sort of like a foreign invader, a thing that’s sitting inside that’s separate from their normal body,” said principal investigator Jeff Wrana, a molecular biologist at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute in Toronto.

“But, in fact, the cancers are intimately communicating in a dialogue with the normal cells around them,” he said. “So basically, the normal cells are passing signals to the tumour cells and the tumour cells are passing signals to the normal cells.”

Working with human breast cancer cells in the lab, Wrana and colleagues found that tumour cells get sets of instructions in the form of protein “messages” passed between healthy and cancerous cells.

It’s been known for a while that communication existed between these cell types, but it was thought it was akin to “words” or incomplete “sentences.”

‘We discovered that the normal cells were basically sending an entire paragraph of instructions to the tumour cells’

“But what we discovered was that the normal cells were basically sending an entire paragraph of instructions to the tumour cells,” said Wrana.

“And these instructions were actually telling the tumour cells how to use its own machinery to invade and metastasize, to spread throughout the body.”

The protein that does the talking is part of tiny fragments of cells called exosomes. In cancer, the tumour cell releases exosomes to influence neighbouring cells — and those nearby normal cells secrete exosomes that help tumour cells to spread.

‘The tumour cells are kind of tweaking the normal cells and making them misbehave’

“The tumour cells are kind of tweaking the normal cells and making them misbehave,” explained Wrana. “Then these normal cells start producing things that actually help the tumour cell.”

The researchers, who were at first surprised and skeptical of their finding, also looked for the phenomenon in lab mice bred as a model for human breast cancer.

They found the communication between normal and tumour cells also occurred in the animals. And Wrana said the same process would go on in people.

Handout/Mount Sinai Hospital/Canadian PressJeff Wrana, a molecular biologist at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute in Toronto, says members of his research team were at first surprised and skeptical of their finding, but also looked for the phenomenon in lab mice bred as a model for human breast cancer. They found the communication between normal and tumour cells also occurred in the animals. And Wrana said the same process would go on in people.

“And it’s that spreading metastases, for instance to the lung, that is the cause of death for a vast number of cancer patients.”

Metastases that originate from a primary cancer site in other organs — for instance, a prostate tumour that transfers its cells into bone —likely are activated in a similar way, said Wrana, whose lab will next look for this cell-to-cell dialogue in invasive bladder cancer.

He said the discovery of the exosomes’ role is important because it gives researchers a new treatment target: “If we can interfere with that, then we can block the ability of the cancer cells to spread out of the primary site.”

The research team is looking to develop drugs known as biologics that would block this signal pathway between cells.

“Instead of only targeting the primary tumour, we can now pinpoint the cells in the tumour’s environment that are responding to the tumour and target those too,” said Valbona Luga, a co-author of the study published Thursday in the journal Cell.

“We hope to use our new knowledge of the tumour’s immediate surroundings to intercept its signals to cancer cells, and by doing so, drastically impede tumour spreading,” she said.

DARPA Foam Blocks Internal Bleeding

 This one is too easy by half. The fluids are shot into the injury and contained while it encapsulates the wound itself, halting bleeding. It is a three hour bridge that is enough to save most.

It certainly surpasses the old pressure bandage.

This will quickly find its way into motor vehicle accidents and the related paramedic training. In practice, paramedic training is advancing and improving apace. It is the first stage in recovery and we are slowly solving the worst cases. It is becoming more and more possible to survive the event. It will always be touch and go, but this means that bleeding out after the paramedics arrive is less of a risk.

DARPA FOAM COULD INCREASE SURVIVAL RATE FOR VICTIMS OF INTERNAL HEMORRHAGING

December 10, 2012

Technology developed under DARPA’s Wound Stasis System program resulted in 72 percent survival rate at three hours post-injury in testing

http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2012/12/10.aspx

The Department of Defense’s medical system aspires to a standard known as the “Golden Hour” that dictates that troops wounded on the battlefield are moved to advanced-level treatment facilities within the first 60 minutes of being wounded. In advance of transport, initial battlefield medical care administered by first responders is often critical to injured service members’ survival. In the case of internal abdominal injuries and resulting internal hemorrhaging, however, there is currently little that can be done to stanch bleeding before the patients reach necessary treatment facilities; internal wounds cannot be compressed the same way external wounds can, and tourniquets or hemostatic dressings are unsuitable because of the need to visualize the injury. The resulting blood loss often leads to death from what would otherwise be potentially survivable wounds.

DARPA launched its Wound Stasis System program in 2010 in the hopes of finding a technological solution that could mitigate damage from internal hemorrhaging. The program sought to identify a biological mechanism that could discriminate between wounded and healthy tissue, and bind to the wounded tissue. As the program evolved, an even better solution emerged: Wound Stasis performer Arsenal Medical, Inc. developed a foam-based product that can control hemorrhaging in a patient’s intact abdominal cavity for at least one hour, based on swine injury model data. The foam is designed to be administered on the battlefield by a combat medic, and is easily removable by doctors during surgical intervention at an appropriate facility, as demonstrated in testing.

Wound Stasis performers presented pre-clinical data on the foam treatment at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Surgery of Trauma in Kauai, Hawaii. These data demonstrated the ability of the foam to treat severe hemorrhage for up to three hours in a model of lethal liver injury. During testing, minimally invasive application of the product reduced blood loss six-fold and increased the rate of survival at three hours post-injury to 72 percent from the eight percent observed in controls.

“Potentially, Wound Stasis provides an important addition to our ability to save life and limb. Getting after these heretofore difficult-to-stabilize, if not untreatable wounds, expands our options and effectively extends the ‘Golden Hour,’” said Maj. Gen. Bill Hix, Director of Concept Development for the Army Capability Integration Center at Training and Doctrine Command. “A capability like this is important in any operation, but would prove vital during operations in austere areas where military resources and infrastructure are at a premium,” he said.

“Wound Stasis has been an exciting program because we were able to move unexpectedly from fundamental research to a pre-clinical proof-of-concept based on the strength of our findings,” said Brian Holloway, DARPA program manager. “According to the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research, internal hemorrhage is the leading cause of potentially survivable deaths on the battlefield, so the Wound Stasis effort should ultimately translate into an increased rate of survival among warfighters. If testing bears out, the foam technology could affect up to 50 percent of potentially survivable battlefield wounds. We look forward to working with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on future regulatory submission of this device, and with our partners, the Army Institute of Surgical Research and Special Operations Command, on getting this technology to where it’s desperately needed on the front lines.”

The foam is actually a polyurethane polymer that forms inside a patient’s body upon injection of two liquid phases, a polyol phase and an isocyanate phase, into the abdominal cavity. As the liquids mix, two reactions are triggered. First, the mixed liquid expands to approximately 30 times its original volume while conforming to the surfaces of injured tissue. Second, the liquid transforms into solid foam capable of providing resistance to intra-abdominal blood loss. The foam can expand through pooled and clotted blood and despite the significant hydrostatic force of an active hemorrhage.

In tests, removal of the foam took less than one minute following incision by a surgeon. The foam was removed by hand in a single block, with only minimal amounts remaining in the abdominal cavity, and with no significant adherence of tissue to the foam. Features appearing in relief on the extracted foam showed conformal contact with abdominal tissues and partial encapsulation of the small and large bowels, spleen, and liver. Blood absorption was limited to near the surface of the foam; the inside of the foam block remained almost uniformly free of blood.

DARPA recently awarded a $15.5 million Phase II contract to Arsenal Medical to continue development of the treatment system and support regulatory submission. DARPA anticipates continuing the Wound Stasis program through at least FDA approval of a prototype device.

Icelandic Recovery

Iceland is the one nation that did most of what I deemed necessary back in 2008. Foremost, it bailed out and refinanced the middle class. If you fail to do that it is inevitable that the economy must shrink.

Otherwise, bank finance is a book keeping entry of no consequence. Any money they put out has already been spent and is in circulation. No banker is irreplaceable either so tossing them in prison is an ideal option. There is no end of juniors eager to leap in and replace them and 'do it right'.

In the USA, no effort has been expended to bail the middle class and as a consequence millions remain unemployed. Now we are printing money to cover the natural revenue shortfall and at the same time increasing taxation to further hamper the middle class. This likely means another decade of anemic growth that actually reflects structural contraction.

The only positive note is that the US banking industry is now able to again expand lending to the housing market and we are presently seeing a value driven rebound in building beginning. Hopefully this is not choked off.

How the US Bankers are evading prison is astonishing.

Iceland’s Hörður Torfason – How to Beat the Banksters

Source: http://www.wakingtimes.com

By Alex Pietrowski

The tiny Nordic European island country of iceland is presently experiencing one of the greatest economic comebacks of all time.  After the privatization of the banking sector completed in 200o, the economy was thrown into a tailspin when over a five year period,  private bankers borrowed 120 billion dollars (10 times the size of Iceland’s economy). A huge economic bubble was created, causing house prices to double, and making a small percentage of Iceland’s population rich enough to buy up overseas investments, mansions, yachts, and private jets, while leaving an absolutely un-payable debt for all Icelanders. Iceland was facing national bankruptcy.

In response to the failed banking system, in October 2008, Iceland’s revolution against this financial tyranny began, rather casually in the street, in front of the Icelandic general assembly.

In the duration of five months, the main bank of Iceland was nationalized, government officials were forced to resign, the old government was liquidated, and a new government was put in its place. By March 2010, Iceland’s people voted to deny payment of the 3,500 million Euro debt created by the bankers, and about 200 high-level executives and bankers responsible for the economic crisis in the country were either arrested or were facing criminal charges.

In February 2011, a new constitutional assembly settled in to rewrite the tiny nation’s constitution, which aimed to avoid entrapment by debt-based currency foreign loans. In 2012, Iceland’s economy is expected to outgrow the Euro and the average for the developed world, as estimated by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

So how does a revolution like this take root and activate a citizenry to effectively respond to grand scale economic theft by bankers and politicians?

Hörður Torfason, a lifelong activist from Iceland, is credited with organizing the Icelandic ‘Kitchenware Revolution’, beginning with a simple vigil in front of parliament aimed at educating passersby and ridiculing the blatant crimes of the elite who worked there. When the foreign financial community (the IMF and the European Union) pressured Iceland’s Parliament to pass laws dictating repayment of debts privately incurred by bankers, the revolution was formally ignited and nearly turned violent when some Icelanders began throwing rocks at the capital, attempting to pressure the government for redress.

Torfason and his supporters knew that a non-violent approach would be more effective, and formed a “human wall” of clearly marked orange-vested citizens between angry rock-throwers and the police line. Torfason believed that in order for a movement to be effective, one must use reason and information, as well as peaceful demonstrations, to send a strong message to politicians that the people refuse to pay the bankers’ debts.

The end result of the peaceful resistance to economic tyranny is a model for all Western nations who are currently being gutted by a totally corrupt banking system.

This story is much different than what has happened in the US since the banking crisis began in 2008. Large “bailouts” were granted to the bankers, and none of the responsible parties have faced criminal prosecution. And it appears that we are still at the mercy of the currency cartel and the dollar faces total destruction.

In Iceland, the prime minister was indicted, over 200 criminal charges were filed against the bankers, and all of the former CEOs of the 3 biggest banks were arrested. The new government supported citizens by passing a banking remittance that forgave debt exceeding 110% of home values. As a result, “banks have forgiven loans equivalent to 13 percent of gross domestic product, easing the debt burdens of more than a quarter of the population.” (source: Bloomberg.com)

Yes, the country continued to struggle economically after the 2008 revolution. But already today Iceland is thriving, with 2.9% growth in the economy in 2011, and 2.4% estimated by the OECD for 2012 and 2013.

“The lesson to be learned from Iceland’s crisis is that if other countries think it’s necessary to write down debts, they should look at how successful the 110 percent agreement was here. It’s the broadest agreement that’s been undertaken.” – Thorolfur Matthiasson, an economics professor at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik (source: Bloomberg.com)

“This is about our life and the future of the children, of the generations, of the young people.” – Hörður Torfason (source:http://vimeo.com/25824717)

Can America hold out for a banking miracle like Iceland’s and somehow muster the fortitude to demand an end to economic corruption? Perhaps Hörður Torfason is available to help get American mobilized.

Resources:

Meltdown Iceland: Lessons on the World Financial Crisis from a Small Bankrupt Island by Roger Boyes

Inside Job movie by Matt Damon

Sources:

http://www.alternet.org/world/how-gay-rights-maverick-helped-topple-icelands-government

http://vimeo.com/25824717

http://crazyemailsandbackstories.wordpress.com/2012/05/12/icelands-amazing-peaceful-revolution-still-not-in-the-news-backstory/

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/08/01/1001662/-Iceland-s-On-going-Revolution

http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/964401/cenk_uygur%3A_iceland_shows_bailing_out_middle_class_works%2C_not_bailing_out_banks/

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-20/icelandic-anger-brings-record-debt-relief-in-best-crisis-recovery-story.html

This article is offered under Creative Commons license. It’s okay to republish it anywhere as long as attribution bio is included and all links remain intact.

They Know it is Christmas in China

 The genius of Christianity was in the celebration of Christmas itself as a showcase of Christian thinking. What it does is that every year, every child is drawn into a cycle of gift giving that is impossible for families to resist. And once begun, it becomes a pattern and way more importantly, that child remains sympathetic to christian teaching.

In a vacuum of spiritual teaching, there is still Christmas.

A successful university experience does include investigating many viewpoints, so it is little surprising to see plenty of activity there. Whatever the case, the government is typically nervous and walking on eggs as they should.

In the meantime, the Chinese Government need only look next door into South Korea to glimpse the future. That country is well on the way to becoming a majority christian country.

At the same time, I think the government really does not have a strategy to stop the process itself and plenty of experience in how repression fails miserably.

Sooner or later, Chinese political life will rationalize and we all know pretty well what it will look like even if they are waiting for a few more of the old boys to die out. At that point, freedom of religion is easily and safely granted. A government secure in the support of the people has no reason to fret over religion.

Robert Fulford: In China, yes they know it’s Christmastime

Robert Fulford Dec 22, 201

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/12/22/robert-fulford-in-china-yes-they-know-its-christmastime/

Christmas will be more widely celebrated in China this year than at any time in memory. Everyone who claims any knowledge of the subject believes that the number of Chinese Christians has been growing steadily over the last decade. Communist bureaucrats harass Christians, isolate them, try to manipulate and divide them. And yet by the standards of recent decades, Chinese Christianity now seems remarkably resilient.

No one knows how many Chinese are Christian. The State Administration for Religious Affairs, which supervises all religion, says there are about 25 million, apparently the government’s optimistic understatement. Christian activists, on their many blogs, claim 50 million to 100 million. The Global Religious Landscape, a demographic study released this week by the Pew Research Center, estimates 68 million, based on 2010 data.

Whatever the real number, no one denies the memorable comparison made on the BBC in September by Tim Gardam, a journalist and principal of St Anne’s College, Oxford: “There are already more Chinese at church on a Sunday than in the whole of Europe.”

Since about 1980, the Chinese government has directed toward Christians a relatively moderate but still annoying and persistent form of religious oppression. The meager results of its efforts are heartening: Having been subjected to the most extreme and degrading forms of government harassment and directives over three generations, many Chinese nevertheless insist on making up their own minds about issues they consider important.

Brent Fulton, a life-long China-watcher with a PhD in political science, runs ChinaSource, a Christian nonprofit based in Hong Kong. Recently he remarked that Christian parents, like many other Chinese parents, dislike the narrowly technical education many schools in the country offer: “You’ve got Christians now setting up schools — primary schools, kindergarten, home-schooling networks. There’s a movement of Christian families even sending high school students abroad for study in a Christian high school.”

These developments have frightened the power centre. A 9,000-word document on the prevention of campus evangelism was issued last year by the Central Committee of the Communist Party, but leaked only this week. It claims that foreign governments are using Christianity to infiltrate higher education and create “ideological and cultural erosion” in China.

The document gives off an aroma of paranoia that makes it, despite the clotted prose, fascinating.

The Central Committee claims that US-led elements “market” their ideas under the guise of donating funds for education, academic exchanges, etc.

Marxist atheism remains popular on our campuses — maybe more so than in China itself

“The college years are a critical time in the establishment of a person’s worldview, view of life and system of values,” we are told. The goal of the alien forces “is not just to expand religious influence but more to vie with us for our young people, our next generation.”

Infiltration is growing more intense, the Central Committee warns: “You must not underestimate the current harm and the long-term effect of such phenomenon, and you must take forceful measures.” It orders local governments, “Public Security organs” (police) and universities to treat education as an ideological and cultural battlefield where China’s political stability must be ensured.

Among the recommendations: Universities should strictly control religious personnel entering China, and they must not invite foreign professors who might be tempted to proselytize. For some years foreign teachers with Christian affiliations have been required to promise in writing that they won’t talk about religion when they lecture at Chinese universities; that precaution has apparently proven insufficient.

So Chinese embassies around the world will report on possibly dangerous teachers. The Ministry of Education will set up a data bank to circulate information about religious organizations infiltrating institutes of higher education. Instructors who insist on proselytizing will be fired. If sites of religious activity are established near universities, Public Security organs will abolish them.

The regulations of the State Administration for Religious Affairs forbid public praying, hymn-singing and other “religious activity” except in officially designated places of worship. But many thousands of unauthorized “house churches” have sprung up, offering energetic and charismatic worship that proves particularly attractive to the young. In recent years the house-church movement has moved beyond its rural beginnings and found new adherents in the cities. House churches are mostly ignored by the authorities but may be closed down if worship spills out into the streets.

The Central Committee’s warning says that universities must “Make education in Marxist atheism the foundational work in resisting infiltration and campus evangelism.” Marxism has lost its influence in economic affairs, but the Central Committee assumes that it still appeals to intellectuals in the universities — much as it does in the universities of Canada and other nations of the West.

Indeed, Chinese functionaries would love our college campuses. In most cases, “Marxist atheism” remains popular — Arguably more so than in China itself.

The Big Grizzlies

The first several pictures came to me by way of a prospector friend who got it from the hunters who nailed this giant.  It was close in weight to the record holder shown later.  I also included a Komode from Coastal Alaska.  You really do not have any good options if you meet this in the woods and it charges except to shoot straight and often.  In fact you should not even think to venture into Bear country unless you have practiced the fine art of rapid fire with a heavy rifle to a solid level of real skill.

Many do and many die.

Do note that the bear killed in Alaska was happily hunting and eating humans.   Black bears are generally pussy cats and not too swift.  A grizzly sees dinner and will instantly convert to forty miles per hour in a charge intended to take down a moose.  They are extraordinarily dangerous.  A lot of bush rats do get too comfortable in their presence, but that is an error waiting to be corrected.

They say things are big in Texas, but...

http://thedeadhand.com/Journal/tabid/160/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/98/They-say-things-are-big-in-Texas-but.aspx

It happened like this. An unnamed Forest Service worker was out on his own time in the Alaska wilderness hunting deer. Suddenly, a large grizzly bear charged him from about 50 yards away - one moment he was enjoying his hunt, the next he was fighting for his life. The guy emptied his 7mm Magnum semi-automatic rifle into the bear, and it dropped a few feet from him. Since the big bear was still alive, he reloaded and shot it several times in the head.

The bear was just over one thousand six hundred pounds. It stood 12' 6" high at the shoulder, and 14' to the top of his head, making it the largest grizzly bear ever recorded anywhere in the world.

Of course, the Alaska Fish and Wildlife Commission did not let him keep the grizzly as a trophy, but they will stuff and mount it, and place it on display at the Anchorage airport to remind tourists of the risks involved when in the wild.

Based on the contents of the bear's stomach, the Fish and Wildlife Commission established the bear had killed at least two humans in the past 72 hours including a missing hiker. The US Forest Service backtracked from where the bear was shot, and found the hiker's 38-caliber pistol emptied, not far from the hiker's remains.  They haven't found the other body yet

Although the hiker fired six shots and managed to hit the grizzly with four (the Service ultimately found four 38 caliber slugs along with twelve 7mm slugs inside the bear's carcass), he only wounded the bear and probably really pissed it off.

The bear killed the hiker about two days prior to the bear's own death.

Think about this:

If you are an average size man, you would be level with the bear's navel when he stood upright.  The bear would look you in the eye when it walked on all fours!  To give additional perspective, consider that when standing on its hind legs, this particular bear could walk up to an average single story house and look over the roof, or walk up to a two story house and look in the bedroom windows.

So how big is big?

Economic Restructuring Via Obama

While our politicians are dancing around the financial cliff, what is kicking in on the ground is a nasty tax regime grossly gamed by a rent seeking insurance industry that has managed to force themselves into the game. No public bureaucracy in the world would create a medical delivery system so overpriced and out of control. It really is that bad.

Now it rides in and will tax directly to feed its appetites. This article may be over the top, but this has put huge uncertainty into the economy while causing a restructuring of how the bottom third of the population get paid. As this spells out, they will be doing a lot of hurting.

The hard reality is that the US medical delivery system is moving to a tipping point in which financial collapse becomes inevitable. The leverage has been hidden but has bled the system dry. There will be a steady rise in defaults after a brief boost in inflated revenues.

The medical industry will learn that they must provide the service while a decreasing proportion of the population will pay.

Cause and effect: Americans who voted for Obama now seeing weekly job hours slashed below 30 as Obamacare kicks in

http://www.naturalnews.com/038319_Obamacare_unemployment_work_hours.html#ixzz2EuTMAO22

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

by Mike Adams

(NaturalNews) It is the ultimate example of how you reap what you sow: Huge numbers of American workers who voted for Obama are now seeing their own jobs slashed below 30 hours a week as employers desperately try to avoid "Obamacare bankruptcy."

Obamacare mandates for businesses only apply to those working 30 hours a week or more, and while many businesses do not want to cut workers' hours, they are being forced to in order to stay afloat. This necessary action is causing businesses to lose money and become less competitive while at the same time destroying American jobs.

Some businesses are also slashing job positions in an effort to get below the 50-employee threshold above which Obamacare mandates kick in. So across the country, we're not only seeing workers lose hours thanks to Obamacare; we're also seeing workers losing their jobs.

But the Obama administration will announce these results to be a huge "job creation success!" because workers must now find two part-time jobs that usually pay less than the one full-time job they used to have. The raw job numbers, however, will be spun by the White House into a victory pronouncement of "twice as many jobs exist now!"

Be careful what you vote for

A note to Obama supporters: When you thought you were voting for "free health care," you were actually voting to get yourself "downsized." Your vote was an act of economic suicide. That's because no government can force a business to pay for something that will put it out of business. When government mandates become too expensive for a business to afford, it will simply stop conducting business and that means cutting jobs or job hours.

Imagine: If Obama announced a new initiative called "double pay for all workers" and made it a federal law, he would of course win another popular vote. But employers wouldn't be able to afford the double pay mandate, so they would start slashing jobs or offshoring jobs, and that's exactly what we see today. Every employer in America is right now asking himself these three questions in order to stay above water and not go bankrupt:

#1) How can we slash workers to under 30 hours a week?

#2) How can we offshore jobs to India or other countries?

#3) How can we cut our total number of employees to under fifty?

This is the upshot of Obamacare: the destruction of America's small businesses.

The largest businesses pay almost no tax

At the same time small businesses are struggling to afford Obamacare, mega-corporations like Google are proudly announcing they're paying only 3.5% in taxes thanks to a complex array of global tax-shifting strategies with names like the "Double Irish" and "Dutch Sandwich." As Bloomberg recently reported:

Google Inc. (GOOG) avoided about $2 billion in worldwide income taxes in 2011 by shifting $9.8 billion in revenues into a Bermuda shell company, almost double the total from three years before, filings show. By legally funneling profits from overseas subsidiaries into Bermuda, which doesn’t have a corporate income tax, Google cut its overall tax rate almost in half. The amount moved to Bermuda is equivalent to about 80 percent of Google’s total pretax profit in 2011.

So while Google, one of the wealthiest corporations in the world, pays just 3.5% in TOTAL tax, small businesses across America find themselves paying 30%, 40%, even 50% of their earnings in total taxes, including FICA, social security, inventory tax, capital gains and now Obamacare surcharges and taxes. This is how Obamacare works: Protect the corporate giants while socking it to small and medium-sized businesses.

Obamacare is gutting America's economy and throwing a wrench into the economic machinery that keeps America working. You know why service is so slow at retailers these days? Because Obamacare forced the employer to slash workers' hours. Why do car parts take so long to order and deliver? Because Obamacare gutted the human resources of the parts manufacturers. Why is everything becoming slower, more expensive and more frustrating across the economy? Because Obamacare mandates have forced employers to downsize or lay off their most productive workers.

I ask: What good is a health insurance mandate if it destroys your job in the process of being enforced?

Obamacare supporters have little understanding of economic reality

The simple truth of all this is that economics is a subject best left to those people capable of understanding mathematics, and that precludes the vast majority of voters of either political party. Mathematically speaking, Obama's so-called "mandate" isn't even a real mandate: Less than half of eligible voters actually voted in this recent election, and barely half of those voted for Obama. This means that roughly 75% of eligible voters didn't vote for Obama, yet they must suffer under his economic policies which are based in pure fantasy and delusion.

Obama has zero business experience. He has no clue how economics really works and no knowledge of how to run a successful business, much less the executive branch of government. I know what it takes to create multi-million-dollar companies because I've done it successfully and repeatedly, and I can assure you that the economic policies currently being pursued in Washington will only destroy jobs, destroy America's economy and destroy our economic future.

Democrats, it seems, believe the solution to all this is to make taxpayers pay even more money to the federal government. As we are told by the lamestream media, apparently the only reason the economy isn't celebrating a rapid expansion right now is because workers and businesses are allowed to keep too much of their own incomes. If only Washington D.C. had more of your money, they would use it more wisely, we're told, and fix all our problems. Obamacare is just the beginning: power-hungry zealots like Obama have plans for centralizing control and running everything in your life: health care, food choices, educational choices, private property, energy consumption, home gardening and anything else you might imagine.

So rather than thinking of ways to cut cancerous government out of the economy like a deadly tumor, the people who run the government can only imagine variations of ways to keep expanding it. (This is true across both Republicans and Democrats.) Government expansion necessarily requires an expansion of confiscation from businesses and workers. This action, of course, destroys international competitiveness and American jobs.

How to really create economic abundance in America

It's all cause and effect, folks. If you really want to uplift America's economy, create millions of quality jobs and put the kind of money into the hands of workers that can help them afford private health insurance, you've got to slash the size of government by 80% across the board. Let businesses and workers keep 80% of what they normally send to Washington. With that kind of money in their pockets and bank accounts, workers would EASILY be able to afford health insurance. They would also spend their newly-expanded discretionary incomes on all sorts of products and services that would be a boon to the economy.

Government, you see, is the eternal enemy of economic prosperity. Government has been and always will be a parasite on the economy. Obama and his worshippers don't understand economics. They don't understand what it takes to create abundance out of hard work, dedication and honest savings and investment. It's all summed up in Obama's atrociously insulting quote, "If you have a business, you didn't built that... somebody else made that happen!"

That's a lie. Government builds nothing. It only destroys that which others have built. And Obamacare has succeeded in only one thing: the "scorched Earth" destruction of American jobs and the rapid erosion of economic prosperity.

If you voted for Obama and you're now unemployed or had your hours cut, you are getting a first-hand view of economic cause and effect. I'm not saying Romney would have been any better, because he was just another Goldman Sachs puppet. The real solution to all this is Ron Paul, who wanted to slash the size of government and send people's money back home so they could spend it the way they choose instead of having a bunch of over-fed, over-paid bureaucrats spending their money in D.C.

Instead of blaming Obama, of course, the vast majority of the recently-unemployed will blame their employer! "How dare you cut my hours!" they will scream, oblivious to the fact that their employer did NOT want to cut their hours but was forced to by a cabal of economic morons in Washington who are dismantling America's economy one piece of legislation at a time.

Putting Democrats in charge of the economy is kind of like putting kindergarteners in charge of nuclear missiles. The outcome can never be good... a lot of people are going to get hurt... and somebody else sooner or later has to clean up the mess.

In four years, things will be far worse

As bad as you might think things are right now, in four more years under Obama, they will be far, far worse.

Unemployment will continue to rise. Millions more Americans will desperately turn to food stamps. Crime waves will hit cities like Detroit, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. Homelessness will spread, and people who used to have one good job will find themselves working two or three part-time jobs instead, none of which offer real benefits.

Like a heroin addict who can't quit his cycle of self-destruction, the Obama administration will then insist, two or three years from now, that the problem is caused by government still not confiscating enough money from taxpayers and small businesses. The call for raising more taxes, growing more government and dictating economic policy to the nation will be parroted across the lamestream media.

In the end, the system will collapse. When that day comes, don't be anywhere near a large U.S. city. The reasons for that will be discussed in an upcoming article right here on Natural News.

http://www.naturalnews.com/038319_Obamacare_unemployment_work_hours.html#ixzz2EuSz9rzh

Falun Gong Stability

It is not so much that the Falun Gong is doing anything new at all but it is organizing around the natural communal impulse to provide service. By oneself, you are a rat, but as part of the community you are an organizing force for the greater whole. Just by doing the community is shamed into imitation.

Accepting this and building around it is good governance.

The Falun Gong is an inevitable response to deliberate bad governance that flew in the face of human instincts. Betrayal lasts a moment and isolates the individual. A good deed secures trust and support forever.

Unsurprisingly a grassroots good governance movement is profoundly stabilizing. We may call it Falun Gong, but that is irrelevant. It is a natural movement that a self empowered people will implement globally in confrontation of any larger authority.

How Falun Gong Is Bringing Stability to China

By Stephen Gregory

Epoch Times Staff

December 12, 2012

A photo of a petition of 2,000 signatures submitted in November 2012 on behalf of Falun Gong practitioner He Jincui, of Chenzhou City in southern China's Hunan Province. “Did the Communist Party seize another Falun Gong (practitioner)?” asked one woman while signing. “Please hurry up and find more people to sign for her rescue.”

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/opinion/how-falun-gong-is-bringing-stability-to-china-324498.html

The rats acted like they owned the place. So thought Ms. Yi Lian when she moved her family in 2003 into a 196 square foot apartment in a tenement in a city in northeastern China’s Heilongjiang Province.

In an article recounting her 10-year experience in this building published on the Falun Gong website Minghui, she explained that this modest apartment at least allowed the family the security of having their own place to live. Their home had been demolished the year before by developers.

The apartment stairwell was filthy, though. The janitor only rarely swept it. Bags of garbage were piled outside doors, messy spills fell out of the bags and were tracked through the hallway; mucus, spit, and cigarette butts added to the mess, and rats wandered around at their leisure looking for food.

The grime and the rodents were not the worst of it. The 18 families living in the seven-floor building did not speak to one another. When individuals passed by on the stairs they would not make way. Glances were indifferent or hostile. Everyone was suspicious of everyone else, and one often heard shouting and cursing break out over petty matters.

There were reasons for the state of the little society of this stairwell. Over 60 years of communist rule has taught the people of China to withdraw, be wary, protect oneself, and to take advantage when one can.

Because Ms. Yi practiced Falun Gong, she saw things differently. She tries to live her life according to three principles: being truthful, compassionate, and tolerant. She knew what she should do in this situation and all situations: She should think of others first.

She grabbed her broom and mop and went to work. Each day she would take all of the garbage bags out to the dumpster. She would sweep the stairway from top to bottom and then mop it, picking up cigarette butts by hand, getting down on her knees to wipe up particularly messy spills or scrape gum off the steps.

Once a resident seeing her cleaning up a filthy mess spit on her and said “shameless,” thinking someone from her family had left it there. Ms. Yi was stung, but persevered nonetheless.

And then, things began to change. Neighbors, seeing what she was doing, stopped leaving garbage bags in the stairwell. The steps needed less cleaning. The rats went elsewhere.

As the atmosphere brightened, the neighbors started to open up. They began to trust one another, especially Ms. Yi, and to live in harmony. Laughter sounded in the stairway, where before only curses could be heard.

Her neighbors asked her why she had been so kind, and she told them about Falun Gong. When she asked them to withdraw from the Chinese Communist Party, they did so. And her neighbors, who all worked in different types of jobs, took it upon themselves in their daily lives to try to protect Falun Gong practitioners, who were always in danger of arrest.

Red Thumbprints

Her neighbors’ response to Ms. Yi is not unusual. The Minghui website has documented how throughout China ordinary people have begun standing up to protect the practitioners in their midst.

Wang Xiaodong is a highly respected teacher in Zhouguantun Village, in Hebei Province in northern China. In February 2012, 40 policemen ransacked his house, stole 20,000 yuan (US$3,210) in cash and took him away, leaving his 6-year-old child and 77-year-old mother to fend for themselves.

Outraged, all 300 families in his village signed a petition in April demanding his release. Alongside their real names, they affixed their thumbprints in red wax, a traditional way of indicating the solemnity of a document. In September, they submitted a second petition, this time with 587 signatures.

In June 2012, police came for Li Zhen, a Falun Gong practitioner living in Tangshan City in Hebei Province. When his wife cried for help, 200 people came running and made a human wall between the police and Li.

His neighbors told the police about the time in the summer of 2010 that someone fell into the Qianquzhuang River. Although there were many bystanders, only Li jumped in to save the victim.

They told the police, “If everyone was as good as he, there would be no need for the police. But you are arresting him. You shouldn’t do that.”

An old lady stood by the police car and wept, while one man grabbed a shovel, intending to have a go at the officers, until his neighbors cooled him down.

After a two-hour standoff, the police eventually arrested Li. On the spot, 70 people signed their names and affixed their thumbprints to a petition.

In one case in May 2012, in Heilongjiang Province, 15,000 people signed a petition supporting a young woman whose practitioner mother and sister were imprisoned and whose father had been tortured to death.

Social Health and Stability

These individuals who have acted to rescue practitioners have risked their lives—and they knew they were doing so.

In the case of Wang Xiaodong, police have tracked down those who signed the petitions and demanded they recant any support for Falun Gong. The village has seen more arrests.

Signing petitions on behalf of Falun Gong practitioners has brought reprisals. During one police raid, a woman died when she fell from her fifth-floor apartment.

A neighbor who signed the petition for Li Zhen explained his doing so this way: “Mr. Li is a really good person. He helps whenever and whoever needs help. He is in trouble. We shouldn’t just think about ourselves. We think that he is a good person.”

Those who are supporting Falun Gong practitioners are choosing to put what they believe is right above their own safety. Instead of being ruled by fear of the Party, they are choosing to be ruled by their conscience.

Over the past two decades or so, there has been a lot of talk in China about the need for social stability. In fact, stability is the bugaboo that has been used to scare the Chinese people into believing the Party is indispensable.

And not just the Chinese people. One can’t attend a forum about China at a Washington, D.C., think-tank without hearing someone talk learnedly about the need for stability.

But has anyone noticed that this theory of stability puts the cart before the horse? The Chinese Communist Party spends more on its stability maintenance budget than it does on defense—and the number of mass protests continues to skyrocket.

By putting stability first, the CCP has tried to replace the individual’s capacity for self-rule—for acting on the basis of conscience—with fear, and the Chinese people have grown more ungovernable with each passing year.

The Tsinghua University sociologist Sun Liping has noticed the failure of the policy of stability. He has written, “Because we have taken a variety of measures to ‘maintain stability,’ we could not advance the necessary reforms to build a healthy society; as a result social decay has intensified.”

Ms. Yi has experienced social decay and social renewal, and she and other Falun Gong practitioners know the secret to restoring their troubled nation to health.

Kindness wins hearts, and a life lived according to virtue helps others rediscover their own humanity. That prescription, and a good broom, keeps the rats away.

Christian Growth Momentum

It is easy in the haste and noise to take the Islamic threat seriously. This article reminds of the reality of the situation. Failure to modernize merely means postponement of the inevitable as populations escape through immigration and potential integration into a secular life way.

Modernization, sooner than later means equality of women and freedom of religion. In that environment, Islam is at a proven disadvantage. For that reason alone, Christianity as a movement can easily afford to be patient.

More critically, Christianity happens to be world view that is been adopted everywhere else with actual conversion almost an afterthought. We particularly see this happen in china as it passes from Confucius through Marxism which is at best a Christian heresy onto a neochristian mindset of modernism and significant outright conversion. You will note that Islam is no where to be seen in all this.

A remarkable comment was apparently made at a recent session of top party leaders in china in which the outgoing leader stated that the one decree that he could make that would be accepted without any significant resistance would be one in which he declared Christianity to be the state religion. This tells us that in one century flat, that Christianity has evangelized the whole of China a well as Africa.

As a global religion, Christianity has entered the end game in which outright momentum will erode the Islamic dream as it has this past century. However couched, Islamic barbarism is been confronted everywhere both externally but way more critically internally with the Arab Spring. Yes it is hard to tell, but Islamic authoritarianism has suddenly been trumped. It will become impossible for Arab armies to ever march if not true already.

At the same time, a rational case can be made in science as to the truth of the resurrection of Jesus and by inference the validity of his dispensation delivered from GOD. This opens the door for the conversion of Judaism. That shock would shift the hearts of Muslims generally and open the door there for mass conversions also. Since a large proportion of the Muslim population was Christian by ancestry, a crack will turn into a rout once everyone understands there is no way to stop it.

The continuous rise of Christianity is really one of the most astonishing stories of history itself that could never have been imagined. Modern communication now has made the advance universal and a true octopus in real time.

As this item makes clear, Islam is actually in collapse throughout Sub Saharan Africa and has to be profoundly vulnerable in India. These are the two regions in which live borders exist and both are active in terms of missionary work.

World’s most populous faith

Lawrence Solomon Dec 21, 2012

Islam won’t overtake Christianity

http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/12/21/lawrence-solomon-worlds-most-populous-faith/

With traditional churches in North America and Europe struggling to fill their pews, with atheism on the upsurge and Islam still growing, it is easy to see Christianity as a spent force, fading in relevance to both modernity and Islamic ascendancy.

This view is mistaken. Short-lived setbacks aside, Christianity unambiguously continues the two-millennia-long ascendancy that has made it the world’s most populous faith by far, and that has rewarded the nations that embraced its values with prosperity. Christianity shows no sign of losing its paramountcy, especially since Islam — its long-standing competitor — has never been an economic contender and will soon have peaked in population.

Stats released this week from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life show Christianity’s dominance through the raw numbers of adherents. Almost one-third of the globe’s population — 2.2 billion people — describe themselves as Christian, 600 million more than the world’s Muslims, at 1.6 billion, and 1.2 billion more than the world’s Hindus, at one billion the third-largest among the faiths. Apart from raw numbers, however, lies unparalleled long-lived accomplishment.

Christian Byzantium, the dazzling successor to the Roman Empire, for 1,000 years was the most affluent on Earth, until it fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Then Christian Europe emerged as a power, soon transcending all others in the arts, in the sciences, in economic and in military prowess. In the last century, Christian America has continued the march of progress, joining and eclipsing Europe in all manner of achievement.

In contrast, Islam under the Ottomans, as under the Arabs before them, advanced largely through conquest, plunder and often-brutal taxation of its subjects. Half a millennium ago, the Islamic Ottoman Empire stagnated and then steadily sank, its final collapse occurring during the First World War, from which it never recovered.

The overwhelming majority of adherents to Islam — 96% — today live in Third World countries. Although some Muslim countries have oil wealth, none have an advanced economy and few have the free-market culture and rule of law needed to propel them to the ranks of successful Christian nations. Neither does Islam have Christianity’s near-universal appeal — to rich and poor, to men and women, to literally all ethnic groups and all political ideologies. Unlike Islam, Christianity is well represented throughout most of the world, with roughly one-quarter of all Christians each in Europe, South America, and Africa, and the final quarter split between North America and Asia.

No region better exemplifies Christianity’s success than Black Africa, which in 1900 was a predominantly animist continent with many more Muslims than Christians. And no one better summarizes this success than Ahmad al-Qataani, leader of the Companions Lighthouse for the Science of Islamic Law in Libya, in a frank interview with Al Jazeera in 2006.

“Islam used to represent … Africa’s main religion and there were 30 African languages that used to be written in Arabic script. The number of Muslims in Africa has diminished to 316 million, half of whom are Arabs in North Africa. So in the section of Africa that we are talking about, the non-Arab section, the number of Muslims does not exceed 150 million people. When we realize that the entire population of Africa is one billion people, we see that the number of Muslims has diminished greatly from what it was in the beginning of the last century.

“On the other hand, the number of Catholics has increased from one million in 1902 to … 330 million in the year 2000.”

Al-Qataani attributes Christianity’s success to the “Christian missionary octopus. … As to how that happened, well there are now 1.5 million churches whose congregations account for 46 million people. In every hour, 667 Muslims convert to Christianity. Every day, 16,000 Muslims convert to Christianity. Every year, six million Muslims convert to Christianity.”

Al-Qataani’s numbers for conversions to Christianity differs starkly from those that are reported to researchers at polling bodies such as Pew, which claims Christianity has made no gains at all at the expense of Islam. But there’s a ready explanation for what could be severe undercounting of Christians and overcounting of Muslims by Pew — converts from Islam face extreme penalties, even death, making many unlikely to confide in pollsters. For different reasons, an undercounting of conversions to Christianity is likely to also occur in China, where Christians must worship surreptitiously to avoid the wrath of the Communist Party. According to Pew, China has but 67 million Christians. Estimates from other sources put the number at 100 million to 300 million.

Pew projects that Islam, which it believes has been growing somewhat faster than Christianity, will increase its share of the world’s population to 26.4% in 2030, up from a current 23.4%. But a different analysis suggests Muslim women are becoming empowered at eye-popping rates, leading to plummeting birth rates in the Muslim world.

In a paper last year from the American Enterprise Institute, Fertility Decline in the Muslim World: A Veritable Sea-Change, Still Curiously Unnoticed, researchers Nicholas Eberstadt and Apoorva Shah discovered that over the last generation, Muslim women have decided to have far fewer babies — an average of 2.6 fewer babies each on average in the 48 Muslim countries and territories they studied. In Oman, the number of births “plummeted by an astonishing 5.6 births per woman.” Looked at another way, in 22 of the Muslim jurisdictions women had no more than half as many children, Iranian women reduced their number of babies by 70%. These findings, based on UNDP data to the year 2005, now appear to understate the baby dearth among Muslims. More recent government data indicates even further declines. In 2000, the UNDP projected that Yemen in 2050 would have a population of 102 million. It has now slashed that projection to 62 million; another official agency projects but 48 million.

With rising affluence and modernity, societies tend to produce fewer babies, we’ve long been led to believe. But Muslim women don’t conform to the conventional wisdom. As the researchers put it, Muslim women now have “childbearing patterns comparable to those  of contemporary affluent Western non-Muslim populations [despite Muslims having] substantially lower levels of income, education, urbanization, modern contraception utilization, and the like than those that characterize the more developed regions.” Their explanation, which jives with a pathbreaking 1994 study, is that women (not socioeconomic factors) decide how many babies they want. Through ways the researchers don’t understand, Muslim women in this globalized age are increasingly making choices for themselves, despite their reduced access to contraceptives. And all else equal, the researchers predict, Muslim women will in future have fewer children than non-Muslims.

With Muslim birth rates approaching those in the West, the prospects of Islam ever overtaking Christianity recede. Those prospects diminish further still because Christianity in the West continues to be strong — the great majority continue to identify themselves as Christian, because they hue to Christian values.

In the Parable of the Talents, Jesus taught that those who invest their money will be rewarded while those without initiative will be punished. In most countries, most Christians believe in the prosperity gospel — that God will grant wealth and good health to people of faith. Over the last 2,000 years, their faith in Him has been repaid.