My column from two weeks ago (Hurricanes Ravaged MSM)
leveled a charge at the mainstream media for being
indirectly complicit in the terrorist attacks that
continue in Iraq and Afghanistan. I wrote, “…[T]errorists
rely on publicity to enhance their terror. But the
American MSM's obsession with the negative—its focus on
reporting car bomb attacks as the sole news in
Iraq—coupled with its penchant to ignore the good
news in the region may be unintentionally encouraging al
Qaeda.”
It turns out I have
been vindicated by al Qaeda’s #2 man in Iraq himself,
Ayman al-Zawahri.
In a letter to his top
deputy in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Zawahri compares
the war in Iraq to Vietnam. “In the aftermath of the
collapse of American power in Vietnam—and how they ran
and left their agents, things may develop faster than we
imagine…More than half of this battle is taking place in
the battlefield of the media.”
m m m
Drought?—what drought?
At the time of this writing, it appears my rain gauge
has collected somewhere close to 5” of rain. This is
after dumping out almost 9-1/2” a week ago on Sunday
morning. And it’s not over yet. We may have dodged a
hurricane in what has been one of the busiest years for
named tropical storms in recent memory. But we were not
excluded from the rain. October will go down in the
record books as the wettest October in the history of
meteorological record keeping. But this is really
nothing new.
In March 2002, my
column “New Jersey is High and Dry but Wait a Week,” ran
in several newspapers in the state. In that column, I
referred to an earlier column from 1999, written on a
similar topic.
“Droughts and Other
Meteorological Phenomenon Come and Go,” explained that
weather extremes are the norm and not really extremes at
all. Here’s what I wrote: “2.25 inches of precipitation,
as measured in my rain gauge, fell on northern New
Jersey over a 10-day period in early September. Other
areas of the state received up to five inches of rain.
Then Tropical Storm Floyd made its appearance and really
filled the reservoirs. It almost seemed humorous. In
July, Gov. Christine Todd Whitman declared a state of
emergency because we didn’t have enough water. Six weeks
later, she declared a state of emergency because of too
much water. It all goes to prove a point, droughts come
and go. They do not portend the end of the world.”
So if you were thinking
all of this weird weather is a portent of more ominous
happenings, you can relax.
m m m
And while relaxing, if
you are sipping a glass of wine, thinking you are doing
your body a favor, think again. My column “Recently
Reported Health Benefits of Red Wine Are Dead Wrong,”
that ran in March 2003 challenged the assumption that a
glass of red wine every day is a healthy way to lower
cholesterol. I reported on a study about a compound
called resveratol, found in grapes, peanuts and red wine
as having been shown to extend the lifespan of yeast
cells by up to 80 percent. “Experiments on worms, flies
and mice are next. Why winos don’t live to be 130 wasn’t
addressed in the study—more on this point later,” I
wrote.
I listed many of the
negative effects resulting from alcohol consumption;
among them, alcohol-related crimes, domestic violence
and abuse, liver disease and injuries and fatalities
caused by drunk drivers. I concluded the negatives far
outweighed any alleged health benefits.
Despite providing ample
statistics to back up my claims, several letter writers
and one persistent journalist took me to wood shed. I
was accused of bias (imagine that!—expressing an opinion
on the opinion page) among other things.
But the jury is still
out—way out—on the alleged health benefits of red wine.
A study last summer of 13,000 wine drinkers was
conducted by the Berkeley, California-based Prevention
Research Center of the Pacific Institute for Research
and Evaluation, a nationwide nonprofit public health
research and program institute. The results were
published in the June issue of the journal Drug and
Alcohol Dependence. The data collected from the
participants demonstrated that the lifestyles of people
who prefer a glass of wine are in general healthier to
begin with.
“The notion that wine
itself has health benefits fails to take into account a
host of other factors, including that wine drinkers
apparently live healthier lifestyles,” said Mallie
Paschall, Ph.D., the principal investigator on the
study. “Our finding that there’s a relationship between
wine preference and healthy lifestyles raises questions
about those studies that propose health benefits from
wine itself.”
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