The Vampirization of America

By Michael Tolkin

December 20, 2009

In times of political rot and confusion and pain, one needs something like cosmic silliness, not to make sense of things, but for those who don't expect a life after death, we need an experience, in this life, of the dream of heaven. Tossed into fear, like children, we need a childish vision to restore faith in life. The worse things get, the more we need greater art. Since Pina Bausch wasn't in town, there was Mozart's "Magic Flute" at the L.A. Opera not long after 9/11. We needed Mozart because the country was Wagner, pinned to false mythologies of necessary doom.

The genius of that 2001 production was that it felt like it had been put on by a high school with the best singers in the world. It was adolescent joy, with one image that stayed with me. Rodney Gilfry as Papageno the bird catcher, wearing a fool's cap and bells in a costume with more colors than Joseph's coat, was singing on stage while a rowboat on wires sailed overhead, carrying three boys dressed like Harry Potter, with his glasses. Young magicians, "Magic Flute," makes sense.

Who would they put in the boat a decade later? A Harry Potter reference now would seem like product placement, not a little wink.

If we look to the Young Adult shelf now for another character type to use as a little reference point, we find death. In the last decade, the four types being found on the shelves of Young Adult Fiction have replaced all previous human character types. We no longer have anima/animus, ego/id/superego, saint/sinner.

We have Wizards, Werewolves, Zombies and Vampires.

Wizards know that the world is made of light and dark, and struggle to keep faith with the light. They're a weakened force now, frustrated by the way spells dissipate in time, and too dependent on magic wands and hybrid cars. Ten years ago, children wanted to be Harry Potter, but now they want to be vampires, the type most drawn to power, anything not to be exposed out as a zombie, while the werewolves, like real wolves, are hated and hunted.

Obama was elected by the wizard brigade, a children's crusade. Obama read "Harry Potter" to his Sasha and Malia. It is inconceivable that he's reading them the vampire books. The wizards are in bad shape now because, being young wizards, they had too much faith in undefined Hope and not enough clarity about policy and compromise, which is to say, they'd forgotten that the dark side runs through all of us. But who can blame the wizards for wanting to regress, seeing as they do that they're surrounded now by Zombies, the tea baggers, a growling mob of brain-dead idiots led by the Vampires.

There's not much to say about the Zombies among us. The Zombies are the muddled herd of the maggoty brain-dead, reduced by their confusion to singular obsessions. What upsets them about Obama's origins is that he has actual proof of human birth. They are the Living Dead in George Romero's shopping mall, no money, no credit, still shopping. They're the embarrassing reflection of our lives, which is why Zombies have changed from nightmare flesh-eaters to comic punch lines, although it's not really a joke that we've set the Zombies on the cover of Jane Austen novels; this is a kind of evil, but again, ours is a culture that resents life, so it makes sense that we'd send emissaries back in time to ruin our heritage with mockery.

Vampires, like wizards, know that the world is made of light and dark, and want to seduce the living into the night. The Vampires are telling us two great seductive lies. There's the "True Blood" lie: "I don't need human blood, I have a substitute now." There's the "Twilight" lie: "I'm a vegetarian now. Those other Vampires are bad, and the Werewolves are bad, but I'm good, you can trust me, you can love me."

The Vampires are the aristocracy of the undead, who can, at least, talk. The Vampires are the fear mongers, the talk show hosts, the politicians who can't find a way to give health insurance to children, much less adults; the bankers, Ponzi schemers, drug company lobbyists, the theologians of prosperity. We can't understand them without first considering why they're in a symbolic war against the Lycanthropes.

Toby Barlow's "Sharp Teeth" has the answer; it's an epic poem about rival packs of werewolves in L.A. I shouldn't be surprised it's not that well-known, because at this moment, in our culture of necrosis, Vampires are sexier than lycanthropes, and as dangerous as werewolves are, they're still just dogs, and there's always something to love about dogs. Dogs always have a heart, and more often than not, a good to reason to bite.

The Werewolves are closer to the Wizards than the Zombies, but are maligned by the Vampires. Werewolves are not the undead, they are the humans split between control and abandon, between society and rage. Every politician or sports figure caught for scandal is a werewolf. In the beginning years of this mythology, Bela Lugosi's Dracula deserved the spike in his heart, he was a mournful villain, but still a villain, while Lon Chaney Jr.'s Wolfman was caught tragically by his blood disease, and knew he needed to die for the protection of those he loved. He was a hybrid, no different in that sense than Spider-Man or the Hulk or a Prius.

The Werewolves are being targeted by the Vampires because that part of them which is still human, and still alive, is the great threat to the Vampires; one may say that the alliance of the Wizards and Werewolves is all that can save us from the Vampires and their army of Zombies.

The love of vampires is the love of death, not a heavenly immortality but a contagious negation of productive life, the equation of sex and death. The symbolic world is splitting between vampire and dog, between those who love death and want to spread it, and those who just want to claim their territory and their pack so they can eat and sleep and hump something once in awhile.

A country led for eight years by torturers has not yet -- and cannot -- produce a work of popular art to make sense of the reasons for these shifts in imagination. We are in a race against the death of posterity, since Zombies have no memory, and Vampires want to kill the most important memory, which is to remember that one is still alive and can choose. The roots of Vampirism are always in the murky past, but American Vampirism isn't a Romanian import. You can find it in "Huckleberry Finn," our literature's greatest insult to the American fantasy of its own nobility, the novel that mocks the great-great-great-grandparents of the tea-bagging zombies, their racism, cruelty, religion and stupidity. Today Twain would call that culture Palinism.

Palinism is vampirism, as she leads her army of Zombies, who refuse to concede that carbon dioxide levels are man-made because they want the world to heat up, because they are cold and dead and want to burn or drown everyone else, because death is jealous of life.

Palinistic Vampirism controls the Zombies, and uses them as proxies to call for the massacre that the Vampires are too clever to ask for themselves. But they do want blood. There is no vegetarian vampire, and vampires are always and only liars. Werewolves, like any dog who steals from the table, may be liars, but unlike the Vampires, they don't want power. The Vampires can't be reasoned with.

If there's any hope, and there always is, their denial of global warming gives them away, shows that underneath the death cult they're scared, and that fear in its way is proof of their humanity. Science scares them, because they're afraid of being lost in the leap of imagination to reconcile faith and science. Their fear stupefies them, and they fear the loss of God and the fall into chaos if science is right; they're too nervous to consider that science is fact and religion is poetry and that there can still be a God, but that he leaves science to us and reserves for himself the right to make up stories and delight himself with metaphor, leaves science to hard work and verification and art to inspiration and effort that needs no proof beyond the way Mozart gives pleasure.

Michael Tolkin is a novelist and screenwriter; among his credits are "The Rapture," "The Player" and "Nine."

Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times

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COMMENT: 1.) Vampire = psychopath = defective and inferior. If 1%, that's over 3 million in the U.S.; if 2%, over 6 million.

2.) There is no such thing as a greenhouse gas. The greenhouse model of global warming has never been scientific. You are not free to make stuff up and then pretend it's true, in science or in life.

Every experience in this world is an opportunity to practice discernment.

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A Fish Oil Story

By PAUL GREENBERG

Published: December 15, 2009

“WHAT’S the deal with fish oil?”

If you are someone who catches and eats a lot of fish, as I am, you get adept at answering questions about which fish are safe, which are sustainable and which should be avoided altogether. But when this fish oil question arrived in my inbox recently, I was stumped. I knew that concerns about overfishing had prompted many consumers to choose supplements as a guilt-free way of getting their omega-3 fatty acids, which studies show lower triglycerides and the risk of heart attack. But I had never looked into the fish behind the oil and whether it was fit, morally or environmentally speaking, to be consumed.

The deal with fish oil, I found out, is that a considerable portion of it comes from a creature upon which the entire Atlantic coastal ecosystem relies, a big-headed, smelly, foot-long member of the herring family called menhaden, which a recent book identifies in its title as “The Most Important Fish in the Sea.”

The book’s author, H. Bruce Franklin, compares menhaden to the passenger pigeon and related to me recently how his research uncovered that populations were once so large that “the vanguard of the fish’s annual migration would reach Cape Cod while the rearguard was still in Maine.” Menhaden filter-feed nearly exclusively on algae, the most abundant forage in the world, and are prolifically good at converting that algae into omega-3 fatty acids and other important proteins and oils. They also form the basis of the Atlantic Coast’s marine food chain.

Nearly every fish a fish eater likes to eat eats menhaden. Bluefin tuna, striped bass, redfish and bluefish are just a few of the diners at the menhaden buffet. All of these fish are high in omega-3 fatty acids but are unable themselves to synthesize them. The omega-3s they have come from menhaden.

But menhaden are entering the final losing phases of a century-and-a-half fight for survival that began when humans started turning huge schools into fertilizer and lamp oil. Once petroleum-based oils replaced menhaden oil in lamps, trillions of menhaden were ground into feed for hogs, chickens and pets. Today, hundreds of billions of pounds of them are converted into lipstick, salmon feed, paint, “buttery spread,” salad dressing and, yes, some of those omega-3 supplements you have been forcing on your children. All of these products can be made with more environmentally benign substitutes, but menhaden are still used in great (though declining) numbers because they can be caught and processed cheaply.

For the last decade, one company, Omega Protein of Houston, has been catching 90 percent of the nation’s menhaden. The perniciousness of menhaden removals has been widely enough recognized that 13 of the 15 Atlantic states have banned Omega Protein’s boats from their waters. But the company’s toehold in North Carolina and Virginia (where it has its largest processing plant), and its continued right to fish in federal waters, means a half-billion menhaden are still taken from the ecosystem every year.

For fish guys like me, this egregious privatization of what is essentially a public resource is shocking. But even if you are not interested in fish, there is an important reason for concern about menhaden’s decline.

Quite simply, menhaden keep the water clean. The muddy brown color of the Long Island Sound and the growing dead zones in the Chesapeake Bay are the direct result of inadequate water filtration — a job that was once carried out by menhaden. An adult menhaden can rid four to six gallons of water of algae in a minute. Imagine then the water-cleaning capacity of the half-billion menhaden we “reduce” into oil every year.

So what is the seeker of omega-3 supplements to do? Bruce Franklin points out that there are 75 commercial products — including fish-oil pills made from fish discards — that don’t contribute directly to the depletion of a fishery. Flax oil also fits the bill and uses no fish at all.

But I’ve come to realize that, as with many issues surrounding fish, more powerful fulcrums than consumer choice need to be put in motion to fix things. President Obama and the Congressional leadership have repeatedly stressed their commitment to wresting the wealth of the nation from the hands of a few. A demonstration of this commitment would be to ban the fishing of menhaden in federal waters. The Virginia Legislature could enact a similar moratorium in the Chesapeake Bay (the largest menhaden nursery in the world).

The menhaden is a small fish that in its multitudes plays such a big role in our economy and environment that its fate shouldn’t be effectively controlled by a single company and its bottles of fish oil supplements. If our government is serious about standing up for the little guy, it should start by giving a little, but crucial, fish a fair deal.

Paul Greenberg is the author of the forthcoming “Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food.”

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COMMENT: #1) Fish that eat other fish are predators. PREDATORS ARE NOT PREY. You are not free to eat predators.

#2) No, flax oil does NOT fit the bill. "Flax seed oil contains an omega-3 called alpha-linolenic acid (ALA)...The body can use ALA to make all the other omega-3 fatty acids that it needs, including both EPA and DHA...The body uses various enzymes to convert ALA to other omega-3s, and the process is not very efficient, especially as one gets older. Estimates of the rate of conversion range from 5% to 25%. In order to make sufficient amounts of EPA and DHA, one needs to consume 5 or 6 times more ALA than if one relies on fish oil alone." If changes need to be made to ensure continued supply of omega 3's from fish oil, then the government should make those changes, but flax is not a substitute.


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The Crushing Legacy of Bush and Cheney

By Joe Conason

From now on, the headlines about Afghanistan will be slugged “Obama’s War,” and perhaps that is fair enough given the president’s many endorsements of what he has called a war of necessity. It would be much less fair, however, to ignore the events that led us to this moment, when any choice offers no great guarantee of progress and no small prospect of trouble.

Those events began with the inexplicable decision by officials of the previous administration to allow Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and other ranking leaders of al-Qaida to escape from Afghanistan to Pakistan in December 2001. At the time, as a new Senate report on the battle of Tora Bora recalls, Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, and Gen. Tommy Franks, the commander of American forces in Afghanistan, decided not to augment the tiny contingent of special operations troops on the ground with sufficient force to capture or kill bin Laden and his deputies. They later claimed to be worried that “too many American troops in Afghanistan would create an anti-American backlash and fuel a widespread insurgency,” a rationale that can only evoke bitter laughter now.

None of the reasons offered back then for inaction at Tora Bora made sense after the outrage of Sept. 11, when the entire world, including the Afghan people, were cheering the U.S. invasion. The pattern of deception that later led to war in Iraq began with expressions of doubt by both Franks and Vice President Dick Cheney about bin Laden’s presence in Tora Bora—a doubt that none of the commanders on the ground shared and that always sounded more like an excuse than an explanation. If there was any chance that the perpetrators of Sept. 11 could be found in those mountains, then maximum force should have been deployed as rapidly as possible.

What we know now, of course, is that Cheney, Rumsfeld and President Bush himself were distracted from the vital necessity of victory in Afghanistan—which meant not only driving out the Taliban but installing a real government in their place—by their obsession with Iraq. Not only did the al-Qaida leadership escape, but so did Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, who returned to mount a threatening insurgency two years later, just as the Bush White House and the Pentagon were declaring “mission accomplished” in Baghdad.

The resulting neglect of Afghanistan—with all the corruption, disillusionment and anger that have ensued—had reached a critical stage when the Bush administration finally departed. Its own commanders were left behind to warn the new president that after eight years of war, the enemy had gained the upper hand.

No further recrimination is necessary—history will render sterner judgments than any that can be written now. But after eight years of incompetence and arrogance, how can the United States salvage what has become of the “good war”?

Escalation appears to be a self-defeating strategy. If the secretary of defense worried in 2001 that a few thousand Americans in Tora Bora would enrage the Afghan population, how will that population react to the presence of nearly 200,000 foreign troops next year? The U.S. occupation of Afghanistan further inflames suspicions of American domination not only in that country but across the Muslim world—as the war in Iraq also did—and especially in strategically vulnerable Pakistan.

As investigative reporter Aram Roston recently revealed in a cover story for The Nation, the Afghan countryside is already so deeply permeated by the Taliban that contractors shipping logistical supplies to our troops routinely bribe the enemy to allow safe passage. Military sources estimated that the payoffs amounted to as much as 10 percent of the cash value of those shipments. So if we spend another $30 billion a year to send in additional troops, roughly $3 billion will end up in the coffers of the Taliban, far more than it needs to buy the ammunition and explosives that kill our soldiers.

President Obama seems to recognize the futility of the current situation. Perhaps he is raising the ante in order to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table, the same objective apparently shared by our allies in Europe and the discredited government in Afghanistan. Unsatisfactory as that would be, it is a legacy of the same politicians who now urge our troops to march resolutely into the deadly mess those politicians made.

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COMMENT: "inexplicable"? Here, let me explicable it for ya: psychopaths protect each other.

9/11 could not have happened - the way it ACTUALLY DID happen - without top-level U.S. government foreknowledge and cooperation.

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Immune System Activated in Schizophrenia

ScienceDaily (Nov. 18, 2009) — Researchers at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet have discovered that patients with recent-onset schizophrenia have higher levels of inflammatory substances in their brains. Their findings offer hope of being able to treat schizophrenia with drugs that affect the immune system.

The causes of schizophrenia are largely unknown, and this hinders the development of effective treatments. One theory is that infections caught early on in life might increase the risk of developing schizophrenia, but to date any direct evidence of this has not been forthcoming.

Scientists at Karolinska Institutet have now been able to analyse inflammatory substances in the spinal fluid of patients with schizophrenia, instead of, as in previous studies, in the blood. The results show that patients with recent-onset schizophrenia have raised levels of a signal substance called interleukin-1beta, which can be released in the presence of inflammation. In the healthy control patients, this substance was barely measurable.

"This suggests that the brain's immune defence system is activated in schizophrenia," says Professor Göran Engberg, who led the study. "It now remains to be seen whether there is an underlying infection or whether the immune system is triggered by some other means."

According to the dominant hypothesis, schizophrenia is related to an overactive dopamine system. Previous studies have shown that interleukin-1beta can upset the dopamine system in rats in a similar way to schizophrenia in humans.

"We would have made terrific progress if we were one day able to treat schizophrenia patients with immunotherapy, as it might then be possible to interrupt the course of the disease at an early stage of its development," says Professor Engberg.

The group is now studying if the inflammatory process is only activated in connection with the development of schizophrenia, or whether chronic patients exhibit the same phenomenon.

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COMMENT: Throughout the history of the human race, a small percentage of the population served their tribes as "shamans", a combination herbalist/psychologist/priest. The healing modality of shamanism is reminiscent of Jungian psychotherapy, in that it deals with archetypal images and the individual's connections to both the whole human race and the cosmos. This recognition of the human need to be part of a larger context was an essential function that the shaman performed for the tribe.

However, the process of becoming an effective shaman was difficult, painful, and fraught with danger. A man or woman who could become a shaman would necessarily be a different type of person than the majority (or, "the normal people"). The process of becoming a shaman would require opening consciousness to a perception of this larger context, which would include elements of reality - internal and external - that normal people do not perceive and could not therefore help the potential shaman prepare for. This experience inevitably fractured the individual, which is a necessary part of the process.

But then the person is supposed to learn how to handle these outside-of-normal perceptions, so that s/he can re-integrate those fractured parts. Upon completion of this process the shaman comes back into the tribe at a higher level of functioning than before the initiation, and therefore can help the tribe maintain that perspective of being part of something larger than themselves.

In modern western "civilization" when a person who has this potential begins this process - whether internally generated or as a result of some particular experience in life - s/he is labeled "schizophrenic", and as the parts I bolded in the article above demonstrate, all of society is dedicated to PREVENTING him/her from completing the process.

And if such a person should succeed in avoiding the medication - which is designed to "make him/her normal again", which is literally "prevent him/her from becoming able to perform that function for society" - and actually reintegrate, the shaman finds him- or herself in a society that desperately needs what s/he has to offer, but they don't WANT it.

For more on this, see http://www.jungcircle.com/Schizophrenia.html

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Pink Brain, Blue Brain

Claims of sex differences fall apart.

Sharon Begley

Among certain parents, it is an article of faith not only that they should treat their sons and daughters alike, but also that they do. If Jack gets Lincoln Logs and Tetris, and joins the soccer team and the math club, so does Jill. Lise Eliot, a neuroscientist at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, doesn't think these parents are lying, exactly. But she would like to bring some studies to their attention.

In one, scientists dressed newborns in gender-neutral clothes and misled adults about their sex. The adults described the "boys" (actually girls) as angry or distressed more often than did adults who thought they were observing girls, and described the "girls" (actually boys) as happy and socially engaged more than adults who knew the babies were boys. Dozens of such disguised-gender experiments have shown that adults perceive baby boys and girls differently, seeing identical behavior through a gender-tinted lens. In another study, mothers estimated how steep a slope their 11-month-olds could crawl down. Moms of boys got it right to within one degree; moms of girls underestimated what their daughters could do by nine degrees, even though there are no differences in the motor skills of infant boys and girls. But that prejudice may cause parents to unconsciously limit their daughter's physical activity. How we perceive children—sociable or remote, physically bold or reticent—shapes how we treat them and therefore what experiences we give them. Since life leaves footprints on the very structure and function of the brain, these various experiences produce sex differences in adult behavior and brains—the result not of innate and inborn nature but of nurture.

For her new book, Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps—And What We Can Do About It, Eliot immersed herself in hundreds of scientific papers (her bibliography runs 46 pages). Marching through the claims like Sherman through Georgia, she explains that assertions of innate sex differences in the brain are either "blatantly false," "cherry-picked from single studies," or "extrapolated from rodent research" without being confirmed in people. For instance, the idea that the band of fibers connecting the right and left brain is larger in women, supposedly supporting their more "holistic" thinking, is based on a single 1982 study of only 14 brains. Fifty other studies, taken together, found no such sex difference—not in adults, not in newborns. Other baseless claims: that women are hard-wired to read faces and tone of voice, to defuse conflict, and to form deep friendships; and that "girls' brains are wired for communication and boys' for aggression." Eliot's inescapable conclusion: there is "little solid evidence of sex differences in children's brains."

Yet there are differences in adults' brains, and here Eliot is at her most origiYnal and persuasive: explaining how they arise from tiny sex differences in infancy. For instance, baby boys are more irritable than girls. That makes parents likely to interact less with their "nonsocial" sons, which could cause the sexes' developmental pathways to diverge. By 4 months of age, boys and girls differ in how much eye contact they make, and differences in sociability, emotional expressivity, and verbal ability—all of which depend on interactions with parents—grow throughout childhood. The message that sons are wired to be nonverbal and emotionally distant thus becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The sexes "start out a little bit different" in fussiness, says Eliot, and parents "react differently to them," producing the differences seen in adults.

Those differences also arise from gender conformity. You often see the claim that toy preferences—trucks or dolls—appear so early, they must be innate. But as Eliot points out, 6- and 12-month-olds of both sexes prefer dolls to trucks, according to a host of studies. Children settle into sex-based play preferences only around age 1, which is when they grasp which sex they are, identify strongly with it, and conform to how they see other, usually older, boys or girls behaving. "Preschoolers are already aware of what's acceptable to their peers and what's not," writes Eliot. Those play preferences then snowball, producing brains with different talents.

The belief in blue brains and pink brains has real-world consequences, which is why Eliot goes after them with such vigor (and rigor). It encourages parents to treat children in ways that make the claims come true, denying boys and girls their full potential. "Kids rise or fall according to what we believe about them," she notes. And the belief fuels the drive for single-sex schools, which is based in part on the false claim that boy brains and girl brains process sensory information and think differently. Again, Eliot takes no prisoners in eviscerating this "patently absurd" claim. Read her masterful book and you'll never view the sex-differences debate the same way again.

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COMMENT: No, claims of sex differences have not fallen apart.

There is no such thing as lying in the service of the good.

If X and Y, the brain is "flooded" with testosterone in the womb; if X and X, then not. Of course this makes a huge difference, though it may not show up immediately. Also, humans are social animals; boys do need to be socialized to be "like boys", and girls do need to be socialized to be "like girls". This is not "denying them their full potential", it is HELPING them develop in a healthy way.

WTF is feminists' problem with natural sex roles? Heterosexuality is good, and healthy heterosexuality should be the goal. That is certainly not the goal of feminism. For adults to achieve that goal, the socialization of natural sex roles should be going on throughout childhood.

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Revised formula counts more Americans in poverty

By HOPE YEN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON – The poverty rate among older Americans could be nearly twice as high as the traditional 10 percent level, according to a revision of a half-century-old formula for calculating medical costs and geographic variations in the cost of living.

The National Academy of Science's formula, which is gaining credibility with public officials including some in the Obama administration, would put the poverty rate for Americans 65 and over at 18.6 percent, or 6.8 million people, compared with 9.7 percent, or 3.6 million people, under the existing measure. The original government formula, created in 1955, doesn't take account of rising costs of medical care and other factors.

"It's a hidden problem," said Robin Talbert, president of the AARP Foundation, which provides job training and support to low-income seniors and is backing legislation that would adopt the NAS formula. "There are still many millions of older people on the edge, who don't have what they need to get by."

If the academy's formula is adopted, a more refined picture of American poverty could emerge that would capture everyday costs of necessities besides just food. The result could upend long-standing notions of those in greatest need and lead eventually to shifts in how billions of federal dollars for the poor are distributed for health, housing, nutrition and child-care benefits.

The overall official poverty rate would increase, from 12.5 percent to 15.3 percent, for a total of 45.7 million people, according to rough calculations by the Census Bureau. Data on all segments, not only the elderly, would be affected:

• The rate for children under 18 in poverty would decline slightly, to 17.9 percent.

• Single mothers and their children, who disproportionately receive food stamps, would see declines in the rates of poverty because noncash aid would be taken into account. Low-income people who are working could see increases in poverty rates, a reflection of transportation and child-care costs.

• Cities with higher costs of living, such as New York, Chicago and San Francisco, would see higher poverty rates, while more rural areas in the Midwest and South might see declines.

• The rate for extreme poverty, defined as income falling below 50 percent of the poverty line, would decrease due to housing and other noncash benefits.

• Immigrant poverty rates would go up, due to transportation costs and lower participation in government aid programs.

The changes have been discussed quietly for years in academic circles, and both Democrats and Republicans agree that the decades-old White House formula, which is based on a 1955 cost of an emergency food diet, is outdated.

The current calculation sets the poverty level at three times the annual cost of groceries. For a family of four that is $21,203. That calculation does not factor in rising medical, transportation, child care and housing expenses or geographical variations in living costs. Nor does the current formula consider noncash aid when calculating income, despite the recent expansion of food stamps and tax credits in the federal economic stimulus and other government programs. The result: The poverty rate has varied little from its current 12.5 percent.

Next week, the Census Bureau will publish official poverty figures for 2008 with a cautionary note about the shortcomings. The agency says it will expedite release of alternative numbers in the following weeks, because of the interest expressed by lawmakers and the Obama administration in seeing a fuller range of numbers.

"The current poverty measure does a very bad job of measuring the impact of quite a few of our anti-poverty policies," Rebecca Blank, the Commerce Department's undersecretary of economic affairs, said in an interview. "It isn't meaningless, but it isn't complete."

Although the White House Office of Management and Budget dictates how federal poverty is measured, legislation pending in Congress would require use of the National Academy approach. Advocates are hoping the White House may act on its own.

Cities are already showing interest.

In New York City, roughly one in three senior citizens fell below the poverty line after Mayor Michael Bloomberg adopted the new formula last year; state officials in Albany, N.Y., plan to publish their revised numbers next month. Los Angeles, Miami, Washington, San Francisco and Chicago also have been considering a switch.

Nationally, official poverty rates for older Americans have improved significantly over the past 30 years due to expansions of Social Security and Supplemental Security Income. But many older people with modest cash incomes would fall below the poverty line under the NAS formula due to out-of-pocket expenses from rising Medicare premiums, deductibles and a coverage gap in the prescription drug benefit that is known as the "doughnut hole."

The NAS figures could take on added significance at a time when the government is touting an overhaul of Medicare and Social Security as its best hope for reducing the ballooning federal debt.

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COMMENT: It's damn near meaningless!

So a family of 4 making $21,204 would be officially middle class? Pardon my French, but that is UNBELIEVABLY MOTHERFUCKING RIDICULOUS.

How much does it cost do buy real human food in 2009, not the cheap commercial crap that has had all the nutrition processed out of it and pollution added in? How much does it cost to live in a safe quiet neighborhood that's less than an hour's travel (one way) from employment, shopping, entertainment, and socializing opportunities? How much does it cost to have reliable transportation?

Here's a real definition of middle class: "enough money and other resources to meet all your needs and have a few luxuries." Significantly more than that is rich, less is poor. I estimate $50,000/yr pre-tax per adult and $25,000/yr pre-tax for each child.

In reality, more than half of U.S. citizens are poor. A very successful psychological warfare operation has been conducted in this country, getting the vast majority to "think of themselves as" middle class. What's now considered "upper middle class" is the standard of living to which the term "middle class" referred from 1945-1975.

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5 young people dead as driver tries to beat train in Canton

BY CECIL ANGEL, AMBER HUNT, TAMMY STABLES BATTAGLIA AND MATT HELMS • FREE PRESS STAFF WRITERS • July 9, 2009

Four young Downriver residents and a Virginia man were killed today after they drove around a crossing gate in Canton Township and were hit by an Amtrak train.

One victim was identified by her mother as Jessica Sadler, 14, of Wayne, who was staying with her grandmother nearby the crash scene.

The four others were young men: an 18-year-old and a 20-year-old from Taylor, a 19-year-old from Woodhaven, and a 21-year-old from Stafford, Va., according to a police press release at 9:30 p.m.

They were later identified as Jessica's boyfriend, Eddie Gross, 18, of Taylor; a 20-year-old from Taylor, plus brothers Sean Harris, 19, from the Detroit area, and Terrence Harris, 21, of Stafford, Va.

'I felt a bump and like metal scraping'

“It’s very tragic, certainly for the family and friends of the people in the vehicle, but also for our crew,” Chicago-based Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari said. “There’s nothing they can do … to stop vehicles from disregarding warnings about an approaching train.”
Witnesses said the young people were headed northbound on Hannan Road between Michigan Avenue and Van Born just after noon when they went around crossing gates lowered at the railroad tracks, Canton Township Police Sgt. Craig Wilsher said.

The train pushed the teens’ car to the Lotz Road crossing, and the victims were dead at the scene, he added. No one has reported problems with the crossing gates recently, Wilsher said.

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COMMENT: America is NOT magical. Reality DOES exist here. You are NOT free to do whatever you want.

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