RELIEF FROM BAGHDAD BOILS
A number of US soldiers fighting in Iraq have become afflicted with a horrible disease called leishmaniasis (leesh-mun-eye-ah-sis). They get it from the bite of a sand-fly which injects a parasite into their bloodstream. The “cutaneous” version of the disease causes huge, ghastly, and painful boils on the face and other areas of the skin - thus the name, Baghdad Boils. The “visceral” version destroys the liver and other internal organs and can be fatal.Compounding the problem is that the treatment seems worse than the cure. It’s a 20-day therapy of being injected with sodium stibogluconate (commercial names: Pentostam or Stibanate), which can leave every joint in your body with screaming pain, plus give you unending blow-your-head-off migraines.There is some very recent research which indicates a way to greatly increase the effectiveness of the antileishmanial drug therapy while greatly decreasing its painful side effects. If you have any friends in the military, know of any soldier suffering from this affliction, or know any soldier serving in Iraq who may be at risk from sand-fly bites, you may want to make them aware of this.It involves the use of a common bioflavanoid called quercetin.
BOLTON’S FIRST CAGE
Now that John Bolton’s UN Ambassador nomination has been sent to the Senate floor, the hot question is: will they or won’t they? Will the Dems filibuster? Maybe, but more likely is they won’t, as it would all but guarantee the quick enactment of the stupidly-named “nuclear option” of ending judicial filibusters. Either way, the betting on Capitol Hill is that he will be confirmed.As he settles in to his new UN offices, don’t expect John Bolton to have been the least bit intimidated by the Dem’s vendetta against him, nor to lie low and not rattle anybody’s cage for a while. That’s not what GW is sending him to do at Turtle Bay. John has quite a list of cages he intends to rattle, and the first one belongs to France.
IRAQS NAILS IN AL QAEDAS COFFIN
More than 400 people have been killed in Iraq in the last two weeks, including at least five U.S. Marines taking part in Operation Matador in western Iraq. A reader wants to know if, in light of this upsurge in violence, I still believe, as I wrote on March 1, that the war in Iraq was All But Won . My answer is emphatically yes. The insurgency is now dominated by al Qaeda. The news media describes this as ominous, as they describe every development in Iraq as ominous. But the opposite is true. Al Qaeda is coming to the fore through subtraction. Many of the "former regime elements" who dominated the insurgency are giving up. The Marines say the insurgents they're fighting in Operation Matador are almost all foreigners, and that they're well trained, well armed, and fighting like cornered rats. That's because they are.
THE GOLDEN FLEECE OF FREEDOM
When you were a kid, do you remember reading the great epic of Greek mythology called Jason and the Argonauts? Sent on a mission he is not expected to survive by the man who has usurped his throne, Jason assembles a crew of heroes, including Hercules, Orpheus, Castor and Pollux, and sails in the great ship Argo across the Euxine Sea to the distant land of Colchis to capture the legendary Golden Fleece.Its a marvelous adventure story which the ancient Greeks believed was not myth but true. And sure enough - it turns out that Colchis was a real place and there really was a Golden Fleece. At the east end of the Black Sea (the Greeks called it the Euxine), there is a range of huge mountains called the Caucasus. The mountain streams that poured down the Caucasus and into the Euxine carried so many particles of gold that the folks who lived there - the Colchians - would peg sheep skins in the streams to trap the gold particles in the wool. Colchis is one of the most ancient lands in the world. Its where the original Caucasians came from. Today it is called Georgia. This week, George Bush sailed in Air Force One to modern Colchis to be wildly welcomed by hundreds of thousands of Georgian Argonauts thanking him for rescuing the Georgian Golden Fleece from its former conqueror, Russia.The people of Georgia recognize George Bush as the savior and protector of freedom that he is. Why cant the Russians? Churchill said Russia was an enigma wrapped in a riddle inside a puzzle. Why cant they live in peace with their neighbors instead of always wanting a piece of their neighbors? Part of the answer must lie in there being no word for peace in the Russian language.
THE TWENTY DEFECTS OF THE ARAB MIND
[Tarek Heggy, a native Arab Egyptian, is one of Egypt’s most prominent intellectuals and most successful business managers. He is the author of innumerable articles and several books, and is a frequent guest lecturer at Oxford and Cambridge Universities in England.]I have written many books and articles over the last ten years about the defects in the Arab mind-set, all of which are cultural defects stemming from three main sources. The first is the repressive climate that prevails throughout Arab societies, the second a backward educational system that lags far behind modern educational systems and the third a mass-media apparatus operated by those responsible for the climate of political repression to serve their interests. The following are the most obvious defects from which the contemporary Arab mind-set suffers:
WINNERS WITHOUT A SPINE… Don’t Stay Winners For Long
The only thing harder to find in the U.S. Senate these days than a Democrat with a conscience is a Republican with a spine.Democrats may have been waxed at the polls last November, but they're running rings around Republicans in the public relations battles so far this year. One example of many is the Bolton nomination.President Bush, through the blunt-spoken Bolton, wants to give the United Nations a dose of tough love. Democrats want a U.N. ambassador who will suck up to Kofi and the French, which is not what a large majority of Americans would prefer. Yet Republicans have permitted the debate to focus on whether or not Bolton was mean to subordinates, charges which would be irrelevant if true, and which appear not to be true.If Bolton is defeated, Bush will receive a black eye, and bureaucrats at the State Department and elsewhere will be encouraged to resist administration policy. This will be almost entirely a self-inflicted wound.
WHY IS BUSH ALL HAT AND NO CATTLE IN IRAN?
President Bush, along with Secretaries Rice and Rumsfeld, has not rallied to the side of the Iranian people, even though the Iranians have abundantly demonstrated their desire to be rid of the mullahs. Two weeks ago there were massive demonstrations and work stoppages in the oil-rich regions, centering around the city of Ahwaz. The demonstrators called for an end to the regime, scores of people were killed, and hundreds were beaten and arrested. On May Day, workers again demonstrated against the regime, this time in all the major cities. In Tehran, strongman and likely president-in-waiting Hashemi Rafsanjani was hooted down by the crowd, and pictures of him and Supreme Leader Khamenei were torn down and trampled. Yet no one in the American Government spoke a word of support for the demonstrators, and no one has yet endorsed the one thing that unites the overwhelming majority of Iranians, whatever their political proclivities: a national referendum on the legitimacy of the regime itself. If there were a national ballot on the single question — Do you want an Islamic republic? — the regime would pass into history overnight. But there is silence in official Washington.
ITS TIME! IN MINSK AND MOSCOW
Next week, the President of the United States will stand next to the President of Russia in Moscow’s Red Square commemorating the end of World War II. Last week, you learned in No Apology, No Future that on his way to and from Moscow, Bush will meet with the leaders of former Russian colonies Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Georgia on how to end the dictatorship of Aleksandr Lukashenko in Belarus. The Kremlin has publicly voiced its displeasure with these meetings. Yet it ought to be far more concerned with an unknown, anonymous student alliance that has successfully overthrown autocrats in four ex-Soviet states, and now has Belarus and Russia itself in its gunsights. While its constituent student groups have names, the alliance itself has no name and no leader. Here is its history:
INSULATED FROM HONESTY: The Quarter-Trillion Dollar Asbestos Criminal Conspiracy
In the past dozen years, 700,000 people have sued over 8,000 companies, schools, and municipalities for asbestos-exposure damages. In 2003, some 110,000 individual claims were filed in that year alone. Asbestos litigation has bankrupted over 70 corporations, costing 60,000 jobs, and forced companies to pay out over $70 billion in court judgments and settlements. The suits were filed as “class action” lawsuits by trail lawyers, who of course got most of the money. The litigation is predicted to eventually produce as many as 3 million individual claims, with a final total of $200 to $300 billion paid by businesses and insurance companies in judgments - or by the taxpayers via Arlen Specter’s bill in the Senate should those companies go bankrupt which many will. That’s over a quarter of a trillion dollar pot of ripped-off gold at the end of the trial lawyers’ rainbow. And over 95% is willful fraud. The quarter-trillion dollar asbestos litigation is a criminal conspiracy between plaintiff trial lawyers and the medical doctors they bribed to fake the evidence.
NEW THREATS and a Valuable Freebie
Is it just a matter of time until cellphone viruses muck up mobile voice communications as they did email? Will we be subjected to ceaseless beeping from phony messages, causing users to chuck their cellphones and thus rendering them incommunicado while on the road (considering that public phones are nearly extinct, having been done in by those selfsame cellphones)? One of the things that makes virus writers tick is the challenge - the ability to get into a system, bend, break and shape it to the virus writer's will. So, with the ubiquity and popularity of cellphones, there's no doubt virus writers will be very tempted to come up with a phone killer, just to be able to say they did.