Author Archives: Editors

‘Beirut, Russian Airline & Paris Carnage’ By F. Sheikh ( Brief Thought)

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Within the span of few days we have seen the horrible tragedies of bombing of Russian airplane, Beirut bombing and now Paris suicidal attacks.  How to eradicate the menace of this extremism? It seems, we are at a loss and at a dead-end to find some credible solution. The natural instinct to use ruthless force to destroy the existing menace, also sows the seeds for the emergence of next monster even more ruthless and merciless. Invasion of Iraq lead to the creation of ISIS.

With current carnage in Paris, there may be now overwhelming military response by the West and goal of destruction of ISIS may be achieved, but it will not be possible without even a larger scale death, destruction and human dislocation. But then what is next? Who will fill the vacuum?  Both Syria and Iraq are in civil war and thousands of refugees fleeing to Europe. The Kurds will expand somewhat their own territory for Independent Kurdistan but they do not have the capacity to go much beyond their own borders. Any Kurdish expansion will also invite furious response from Turkey. The currently held territory by ISIS cannot be managed by weakened Syria or Iraq embroiled in civil war. Naturally it will get occupied by other extremists groups who will try to outdo each other.

Apart from use of force, withering attacks on radical Islamist ideology in particular and Islam in general,  has not done much either to combat extremism, rather on the contrary it is  creating an atmosphere of Islamophobia in the West which is helping create further alienated Muslim youths who are being discriminated against for just external appearance and Muslim names. It is not now uncommon, especially in Europe, for being fired or refused to be hired because of external appearance and a Muslim name. It no longer matters whether someone is a mainstream moderate Muslim or even Muslim atheist, external appearance and Muslim name is enough to deny your civil rights. These alienated young Muslim youths are the natural target of recruiting efforts by the extremist groups like ISIS.

Muslims themselves are also the target of these extremist groups and bombing of the mosques and other soft targets is a daily occurrence in many Muslim lands. The West has not been able to get the support of these targeted moderate Muslims either because of the mistrust of the West in the face of withering attacks on Islam in general and Islamophobia in Western lands.

Islam is in the middle of a civil war both Shia vs Sunni and extreme vs moderate Islamic ideology. This ideological civil war is further complicated by the masses’ desire to get rid of dictators and monarchs. The West is injecting itself in this civil war to protect its economic and politico geographic interests. It has prompted the Russia to enter the race also. By injecting itself in this civil war, both West and Russia has changed the civil war into extremists vs West and Russia. The ISIS has fired back at both.

There are no good options but outside involvement has never done any good in these Muslim lands and it may make it worse. Let Muslim lands fight it out themselves and West and Russia should get out of the way. If countries like Turkey, Iran, Jordan, Egypt and Gulf states are not willing to fight for their own survival and take the lead, then why West should get in the middle and become the target from all the sides.

 

    

 

 

 

War Plans: USA Vs Canada

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War Plan Red

by Angela ChenThe quirky history behind the secret, full-scale invasion that the United States once planned for Canada, and vice versa.

O Canada! The dividing line between the United States and its great northern neighbor is often called “the friendliest border in the world.” Which goes to show how quickly people forget that, over the years, the two countries have wanted to invade each other over everything from dreams of Irish independence to a squabble over a single pig.

The Morning News spoke to Princeton Architectural Press publisher Kevin Lippert about War Plan Red: The United States’ Secret Plan to Invade Canada and Canada’s Secret Plan to Invade the United States, his new book chronicling the sometimes fraught and often ridiculous history of tension between the two nations.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The Morning News: I have to ask: how did you become interested in this topic? How did the history of US-Canada land disputes, which isn’t very well-known, come to your attention?

Kevin Lippert: I was having a conversation with one of [Princeton Architectural Press’s] Canadian distributors, a woman whose job is to sell our books in Canada, and she goes, “Are you working on anything that will be of interest to Canadians?’ I say, “I don’t know, what interests Canadians?” She says something like, “Canadians are very worried about what Americans are thinking of them.”

Then, two days later, I saw an article online where somebody had asked Obama if America had any plans to invade Canada and he laughed it off. But the article added that in the 1930s the United States did have a very detailed plan to invade Canada called “War Plan Red.” That information was shocking and there was something funny about the fact that that was shocking—like, when we think Canada, we don’t care enough to have a plan to invade them. We liked Iraq enough to invade them, but we don’t like Canada enough, it’s not as interesting.

So I dug into that history and it turns out that, like in many things, Canada was 10 years ahead of us and had developed their own plan to invade the United States in 1920. Now we’re such good neighbors and good friends, the idea seems kind of laughable. In fact, several people thought the book was a parody, that I had cooked the whole thing up and sort of forged these so-called authentic historic documents.

TMN: But the history is about more than just War Plan Red, which was in the 1930s, right? Your book discusses all these other times the US tried to invade Canada, such as during the War of 1812 which, it seems, did not go well.

Kevin: Yeah, there has been a long history of border conflicts between the US and Canada, which somehow nobody remembers. The War of 1812 was a major one, where we actually tried to invade. Either I didn’t pay attention in high school or we fast-forwarded past that war, which was a disastrous war for the United States in many regards anyway.

TMN: Why did the attempt fail so badly? Was it just arrogance at thinking that Canada would be easy to take over?

Kevin: It was a bit of arrogance, coupled with some incredible incompetence and some bad luck. Americans in 1812 really thought that conquering Canada would be, as Thomas Jefferson wrote, “a matter of marching.” I mean, we did have eight million people versus 500,000 Canadians, and our army was twice as large as theirs, and we had an increasingly powerful navy.

So I think Americans really thought it was just going to be a cakewalk. But, also, think about it this way. There’s one quote from somebody writing to President Madison saying something like, “Even the most pessimistic thinkers couldn’t imagine how undertrained and inexperienced our men are.” We were terrible soldiers and all our plans to invade Canada fell flat. People are shouting at each other in the dark, one guy rowed off with all the oars for the invasion boats—it was actually comical.

To be fair, some of it was weather-related and some of the troops were sick, but there were other larger factors as well. The war in general plunged the United States into terrible financial crisis—that was the first time the US defaulted—and so it had no money to pay its troops, and desertion was extremely high. I think 15 percent of the army deserted at one point, and there were a great number of executions as result of desertions. So morale was very low, and Canada, as it turns out, is very cold, so they were unhappy troops who weren’t getting paid in this incredibly unpopular war.

In a lot of these cases, there’s this recurring theme in which the US thinks they’re going to be welcomed as liberators. They invaded Canada during the Revolutionary War, for example, and thought the Québécois would join us in a fight against the British. We’ve heard this rhetoric in Iraq as well. Read full article on link below;

http://www.themorningnews.org/article/war-plan-red

posted by f. sheikh

How The Western Diet Derailed Our Evolution

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For the microbiologist Justin Sonnenburg, that career-defining moment—the discovery that changed the trajectory of his research, inspiring him to study how diet and native microbes shape our risk for disease—came from a village in the African hinterlands.

A group of Italian microbiologists had compared the intestinal microbes of young villagers in Burkina Faso with those of children in Florence, Italy. The villagers, who subsisted on a diet of mostly millet and sorghum, harbored far more microbial diversity than the Florentines, who ate a variant of the refined, Western diet. Where the Florentine microbial community was adapted to protein, fats, and simple sugars, the Burkina Faso microbiome was oriented toward degrading the complex plant carbohydrates we call fiber.

Scientists suspect our intestinal community of microbes, the human microbiota, calibrates our immune and metabolic function, and that its corruption or depletion can increase the risk of chronic diseases, ranging from asthma to obesity. One might think that if we coevolved with our microbes, they’d be more or less the same in healthy humans everywhere. But that’s not what the scientists observed.

“It was the most different human microbiota composition we’d ever seen,” Sonnenburg told me. To his mind it carried a profound message: The Western microbiome, the community of microbes scientists thought of as “normal” and “healthy,” the one they used as a baseline against which to compare “diseased” microbiomes, might be considerably different than the community that prevailed during most of human evolution.

And so Sonnenburg wondered: If the Burkina Faso microbiome represented a kind of ancestral state for humans—the Neolithic in particular, or subsistence farming—and if the transition between that state and modern Florence represented a voyage from an agriculturalist’s existence to 21st-century urban living, then where along the way had the Florentines lost all those microbes?

Earlier this year I visited Sonnenburg at Stanford University, where he has a lab. By then he thought he had part of the answer. He showed me, on his computer, the results of a multigenerational experiment dreamed up by his wife, Erica, also a microbiologist.

When the Burkina Faso study was published, in 2010, the question of what specific microbes improved human health remained maddeningly elusive, but evidence was beginning to suggest that diversity itself was important. So despite their relative material poverty, these villagers seemed wealthy in a way that science was just beginning to appreciate.

Where did that diversity come from? Humans can’t digest soluble fiber, so we enlist microbes to dismantle it for us, sopping up their metabolites. The Burkina Faso microbiota produced about twice as much of these fermentation by-products, called short-chain fatty acids, as the Florentine. That gave a strong indication that fiber, the raw material solely fermented by microbes, was somehow boosting microbial diversity in the Africans.

Indeed, when Sonnenburg fed mice plenty of fiber, microbes that specialized in breaking it down bloomed, and the ecosystem became more diverse overall. When he fed mice a fiber-poor, sugary, Western-like diet, diversity plummeted. (Fiber-starved mice were also meaner and more difficult to handle.) But the losses weren’t permanent. Even after weeks on this junk food-like diet, an animal’s microbial diversity would mostly recover if it began consuming fiber again.

This was good news for Americans—our microbial communities might re-diversify if we just ate more whole grains and veggies. But it didn’t support the Sonnenburgs’ suspicion that the Western diet had triggered microbial extinctions. Yet then they saw what happened when pregnant mice went on the no-fiber diet: temporary depletions became permanent losses.

When we pass through the birth canal, we are slathered in our mother’s microbes, a kind of starter culture for our own community. In this case, though, pups born to mice on American-type diets—no fiber, lots of sugar—failed to acquire the full endowment of their mothers’ microbes. Entire groups of bacteria were lost during transmission. When Sonnenburg put these second-generation mice on a fiber-rich diet, their microbes failed to recover. The mice couldn’t regrow what they’d never inherited. And when these second-generation animals went on a fiberless diet in turn, their offspring inherited even fewer microbes. The microbial die-outs compounded across generations. Click link below to read full article.

http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/how-the-western-diet-has-derailed-our-evolution

Posted by f. sheikh