George Rebane

On this gloomy slushy snowy Saturday, we at the Rebane house take any levity-providing-port in a storm.  Didn’t have to wait too long before two qualifying bonmots arrived – one on Fox News and another fortuitous one by email from a regular reader.

Turning on the telly during supper – the slush had finally slid off the dish antenna – we saw on the news Hillary talking to the world about the new offensive in Libya.  President Obama finally gave the nod, and not only that, he authorized the French to take the lead for the first time since Napoleon, and actually strafe one of Gadhafi’s trucks heading for Benghazi.  Sumbich, they actually participated in a joint allied action against a bad guy.  Well, Hillary then went down the list of nations who have gathered to whump Moammar, counting up the planes, ships, guns, and grenades each was contributing.  Conspicuously absent from the list was any Arab country.

But before you could go off half-cocked again about them ‘godammed A-rabs’, she deftly threw in that it was the Arabs who contributed “the pivotal statements” that made the whole aid offensive possible.  (With this, half of my mouthful tried to exit through my nose.)  Wiping away the tears, the best I could tell was that their pivotal statement was something like ‘let’s have you and him fight’.  But that was all it took to launch the French fighter and then 100+ Tomahawk missiles.

Subsequent ruminating about this made me recall that Obama has based the considerable success of his administration on issuing statements that pivot this way and that.  Not a bad strategy to apply on the world scene.  Maybe using a few more of those will let us cut back our defense budget by a hundred bil or so.  Look what the sons of the desert were able to do with just one well placed pivotal statement.

And then our attention turned back to the tragedy in Japan.  Reports of Californians emptying war surplus stores of gas masks and protective clothing brought on a serious thought or two after the giggling stopped.  Opening my emails I found that others also have similar concerns to which, lo and behold, science steps up with the remedy.  It turns out that the propeller heads at an eastern university have done some fine science while the rest of us have been grousing about nuclear reactors blowing up.

We see reported on Stormbringer that –

According to the latest research, red wine – along with its many other claimed benefits – may also protect you from radiation exposure.

A team at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have discovered that resveratrol, the natural anti-oxidant found in red wine, can protect cells from the damage caused by radiation.

In experiments on mice the scientists found that when combined with the chemical acetyl and administered before radiation exposure it protected the cells and helped prevent death.

Well I was ecstatic, and immediately replied – “Given the massive radiation cloud coming in from Japan (well, isn’t it?), this is really good news.  I just popped the cork on another bottle of Shiraz strictly for international geo-strategic medicinal purposes.”

So, in addition to stocking up on a year’s worth of dried beans and rice, we are now advised to lay in a substantial supply of emergency red wine.  These days one can never know when the next magnitude nine will lay low a west coast nuclear reactor, or a raghead pops a nuke in a city upwind of you.  And so’s you won’t have to get prophylactically drunk and be of no use to your family when you hear the news, one should at all times keep a minimum concentration of the grape in your blood.  Hallelujah!