Eat turmuric, avoid Alzheimers. I love curry; I may be doing my brain alot of good. On the other hand, I have hayfever; my brain may be in trouble. (New Scientist)
Daily Archives: 13 Aug 06
‘Test Case’
Seymour Hersh on the real reasons for US support of the Israeli air war. Essentially, given that Iran has helped Hezbollah with underground munitions installations and ‘hardening’ of targets, this may be a practice run for the US preemptive strike on Iranian buried weapons complexes, Hersh says. And all evidence indicates that the plans for this strike on Hezbollah were drawn up, with US knowledge, support and probably assistance, long before the kidnapping of the two Israeli soldiers which sparked off the conflict.
The dysadministration feels they will advance both its simple-mindedly conceived goal of democratization in the Middle East and the TWoT® (timeless war on terror). There have been cross-border incidents before; the kidnapping of the soldiers just happened at the right time, which also seems to have had some relationship to Hamas’ inching closer to resuming terrorist activity, feeling that their transition to a legitimate political force was not going well and that they were losing standing with the Palestinian people.
A major bombing campaign targeting Lebanese civilian infrastructure was supposed to turn the Lebanese Sunnis and Christians against Hezbollah, an idea similar to one US scenario for an air war against Iran. Interestingly, Hersh notes, the war in Kosovo was closely studied as a model for their Lebanon scenario as well.
Intelligence about Israel and Hezbollah, according to Hersh’s sources, is being ‘manhandled’ in the same way that the Bush administration distorted pre-war intelligence about Iraq to suit its preordained purposes. The strength of Hezbollah’s resistance, and the miscalculation of its resources, may or may not be a setback for US neocon hopes against Iran. More likely, the lesson, like all other recent lessons, will never be grasped by the hardliners. There is evidence that Cheney believes the war against Hezbollah is working and should not be halted. In the post-Iraq era, however, as Hersh’s article ends, one cannot avoid considerably less unanimity of outlook, and more fractiousness, either within the US administration, between the US and Blair’s UK, or within Blair’s government. This parallels a similar process within Israeli debate. (The New Yorker)
Yitzhak Laor on the IDF
‘You are terrorists, we are virtuous’: “As soon as the facts of the Bint Jbeil ambush, which ended with relatively high Israeli casualties (eight soldiers died there), became public, the press and television in Israel began marginalising any opinion that was critical of the war. The media also fell back on the kitsch to which Israelis grow accustomed from childhood: the most menacing army in the region is described here as if it is David against an Arab Goliath. Yet the Jewish Goliath has sent Lebanon back 20 years, and Israelis themselves even further: we now appear to be a lynch-mob culture, glued to our televisions, incited by a premier whose ‘leadership’ is being launched and legitimised with rivers of fire and destruction on both sides of the border. Mass psychology works best when you can pinpoint an institution or a phenomenon with which large numbers of people identify. Israelis identify with the IDF, and even after the deaths of many Lebanese children in Qana, they think that stopping the war without scoring a definitive victory would amount to defeat. This logic reveals our national psychosis, and it derives from our over-identification with Israeli military thinking.” (London Review of Books)
Scientists Cast Misery of Migraine in a New Light
“Everything you thought you knew about migraine headaches — except that they are among the worst nonfatal afflictions of humankind — may be wrong. At least that’s what headache researchers now maintain. From long-maligned dietary triggers to the underlying cause of the headaches themselves, longstanding beliefs have been brought into question by recent studies.” (New York Times Magazine)
The article cites research suggesting that a high proportion of so-called ‘sinus headache’ sufferers may really have migraines. If migraines are more common than recognized, is there a spectrum of severity from the utterly disabling attacks which most of us understand as migraines to something in the milder, merely inconveniencing, range, akin to a common tension headache? I know that the vast majority of the chronically depressed women, especially the personality-disordered ones, I see in my psychiatric practice, no matter what the severity or frequency of their headaches, have either been diagnosed with migraines or adopt that label themselves. Should there be a severity criterion for diagnosing someone with a migraine?
Infectobesity
Do human intestinal microorganisms make their hosts fat? (New York Times Magazine)
What America doesn’t understand
“Homegrown U.K. terror is a growing threat, multicultural ‘tolerance’ can’t combat it, and the war in Iraq will only make it worse.” — Andrew Brown (Salon)
And: Inside the Iraqi Forces Fiasco: “The U.S. effort to train Iraqi forces — and bring our troops home — is mired in bureaucratic mismanagement, inept recruits and astonishing shortages of equipment.” (Salon)
