For the last twenty years, veterans of the Persian Gulf War of 1991 have been complaining of a range of ailments, including pain, fatigue, and problems with memory and concentration. And for just as long, the causes have remained uncertain and there has been a tendency by the military to attribute the complaints to post-traumatic stress disorder.

Now a long-term study at the University of Texas in Dallas has used a new technique to measure blood flow in the brains of sufferers and has detected "marked abnormalities" in brain function that can probably be attributed to low levels of exposure to sarin nerve gas. This abnormal blood flow has persisted or even worsened over the eleven years of the study.

"The findings mark a significant advancement in our understanding of the syndrome, which was for years written off by the Defense Department and the Department of Veterans Affairs as a form of combat stress rather than an objectively diagnosable injury," reports the Dallas Observer.

It is an indisputable fact that humans crave fat.

"Why Can't I Stop Eating Fatty Foods?"

French fries, onion rings, donuts, and everything else that comes out of a deep-fryer. Corn chips, potato chips, Cheetos, Fritos, Doritos, Tostitos, and all the other oil-soaked, salt-coated starches in the snack aisle. Oreos, buttered toast, salad dressing. Cheese, mayonnaise, and Alfredo sauce. The list goes on, and on.

Decades of diet propaganda, telling us over and over again that fat will kill us, have been unable to break us of our 'fat tooth'. Why do we crave fat so much?

It's because animal fat is the primary constituent of the evolutionary human diet. "Low-fat" diets just make us crave fat more keenly - and anti-animal-fat propaganda makes us binge on unsatisfying substitutes.

Online hacktivist collective Anonymous has lent its support to a global campaign to simultaneously occupy the major financial centres of London, New York, Madrid, Paris and other cities on 17 September in peaceful protest.

Anonymous tweeted from its @anonops account with the hashtag 'OCCUPYWALLSTREET' and linked to a poster urging its followers to assemble at the financial heart of the US, with the caveat: "Bring Tent."

Dick Cheney is back in the news this week, and for once, he kept his warmongering to a minimum. Cheney is, like most politicians, trying to cash in on his lifetime of destroying the country and enriching his friends by publishing a book. His version of the truth, titled In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir, is published by Simon & Schuster. I guess the original title, "How I Escaped From the Death Star" was rejected for copyright reasons. You can buy it at Amazon at 45% off (already?) or wait a few more weeks and pick it up at your average dollar store.

The book itself is a stunning display of psychological twisting, as Cheney tries in vain to defend the indefensible: The Bush Administration in general, and specifically, the War in Iraq. Cheney defends Guantanamo Bay, the massive military buildup, the torture of innocent Muslims, the loss of American freedom at home (in the name of security, of course), and the general fear-baiting, terror-hyping security state he built on the backs of an attack that I believe he knew was coming.

That's right. I think Dick Cheney knew an event LIKE 9/11 was going to happen on American soil, and he was fully prepared to enact his fascist agenda as soon as the crisis emerged. How do I know that? It's in his own words, if you read with a little insight.

Cheney was chatting with The American Enterprise Institute about 9/11, and moderator Stephen Hayes delved into what Cheney's immediate, emotional reaction to the events was. Hayes said that President Bush nearly cried in public, and that Condoleeza Rice wept at home. Cheney's reaction as the events unfolded? Not a single human emotion.

Nope. Cheney's first thoughts were all about war and who we got to kill, and which brown people we'd get to bomb, now that they were dumb enough to attack us. Cheney focused on "what the targets might be and how we might go after him."

Dog Poet Transmitting.......

'May your noses always be cold and wet'.

I have been putting myself through hoops since last evening when I read this, wondering what I should say and if I should say anything. I was especially astonished by the admonitions given to the Germans about being responsible for the Palestinian troubles, however convoluted the argument. If anyone should take responsibility for The Palestinian Genocide it is Israel and this should be proclaimed by those Israelis who present themselves as friends of The Palestinians. Those who call themselves Israelis have no right to be in Palestine in the first place and they are only there through devious maneuverings and pornographic revisionism.

I'm not here to debate the extent and reality of their marketplace holocaust and I've no inclination to deny or question the details. What I do know is that when you make it against the law to question something then there's something wrong with the facts because the only reason for worldwide suppression of inquiry would be that the facts wouldn't hold water against it. To question the affair is the real province of those who present themselves as agents of truth, in seeming opposition to their countrymen. No one can be an agent of truth who does not only admit but also proclaim that Israel was behind 9/11. No one can be an agent of truth who parrots official lines and never brings certain untenable absurdities to light. Of course, this requires the courage of being capable of it.

To all of those tea-jadist assholes at last night's GOP debate: I don't generally like to use profanity, but I fear that English is above your comprehension level, so in terms you might better understand, may God damn your worthless souls to hell for all eternity.

I had not planned on watching the debate because it conflicted with more important activities, like a new episode of The Closer. But even more importantly, it was being held at a time when I had committed to posting a diary for The Grieving Room. That diary was about the death of my brother from a very painful, uninsured struggle against metastatic cancer.

I had planned to write another separate diary about his journey through what passes for health care in a nation fixated on the profits that that care brings. In a nation where his death was cheered in front of a panel of politicians, none of whom had the decency to object. It is not yet a capital crime in this nation to be uninsured.

Steve worked 14 hours a day building beautiful guitars. Songs will not be sung because he died and will make no more. Thanks to the Republican Party's theft of our national wealth, he barely eked out an existence with financial help from my husband and me. Money for health insurance? Don't be ridiculous.

He was 63. He had to start Social Security early so he could afford to eat. He was too young for Medicare and too male for Medicaid. This nation does not recognize the years he spent working for others and making this economy grow, it only focused on the years he worked for himself, creating instruments of rare beauty.

A six tonne NASA satellite is set to fall uncontrolled out of orbit, potentially raining debris over swathes of the planet including Britain, the US space agency has admitted.

The $750 million (£468 million) Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) satellite, launched 20 years ago to study climate change, is set to breach the atmosphere within weeks.

In a new alert issued this week, officials warned pieces could land in densely populated areas on six continents including parts of Britain, Europe, North and South America and Asia.

Nasa claimed the risk to public safety from the "dead" satellite - which is orbiting just over 155 miles above the earth with an inclination of 57 degrees - was "extremely small".

But senior space agency officials admitted they were "concerned" about the risk to billions of people when it starts falling uncontrolled out of orbit at any stage from later this month.

The government may not want you to know that it set off nuclear bombs willy-nilly in the atmosphere or tested LSD on unwitting subjects, but at least the Science Channel does!

In case you believed that elaborate government conspiracies were merely the driving force behind X-Files episodes, the Science Channel is setting the record straight. As a compendium to their latest show, Dark Matters, which explores the darker side of science, the Science Channel has published introductions and full transcripts from government hearings on some of the most unbelievable -- yet true -- conspiracies, including the highly-controversial MKULTRA project.

According to the 1977 transcript of the hearing before Congress, MKULTRA projects on behavioral modification, drug acquisition and testing took place over the better part of a decade, from 1953 through 1964.

Perhaps best known for administering the psychedelic drug LSD to unwitting participants, MKULTRA actually was composed of 149 (known) projects, across 86 universities and institutions, that dabbled in everything from harmless hypnosis to horrific human testing.

No one was spared. The CIA was an equal-opportunity abuser. The report details it as an "extensive testing and experimentation" program that included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens "at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign."

When British amateur astronomers Richard Carrington and Richard Hodgson independently saw a brightening of a small region of the Sun about 150 years ago, in 1859, they saw a very powerful event now called a solar flare. Since American astronomer George Ellery Hale discovered about 100 years ago that sunspots are regions of strong magnetism on the Sun, astronomers have linked magnetic storms on Earth to sunspots and to the solar-activity cycle. For roughly the last 50 years, solar flares have been categorized and detected by the x-rays they give off. The current classification of flares goes, in increasing power at their peak, A, B, C, M, X.

Last Wednesday, scientists reported that they haven't been noticing most of the solar flares' energy. In a NASA Press Conference, held simultaneously with the release of a paper online in The Astrophysical Journal, they reported on new results based on observations with NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. Since its launch on February 11, 2010, SDO has detected over a couple of hundred solar flares with its extreme-ultraviolet measuring instrument and with its cameras that take images also in that part of the spectrum beyond the violet, the ultraviolet. (Far into the ultraviolet is known as the extreme ultraviolet.) Several analyses have now shown that at least a group of the most powerful flares, which are detected in x-rays by satellites such as the GOES (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite) series of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, give off more energy about 90 minutes later than the x-ray peak than occurred in that first detected peak. This hitherto undetected second peak may not be quite as powerful at its maximum as the first peak but covers a somewhat longer time, rising to its peak and falling more slowly than the x-ray peak. It can thus contain more energy than the first peak.

Lightning discharges in the atmosphere are familiar, but what about the ones underground?

The electrical phenomenon we call lightning is not well understood. The most common interpretation involves the circulation of water vapor up and down through clouds in a process called convection. Water is heated by the Sun until it evaporates, rising into the air where it collects into clouds. The water vapor continues to rise higher and higher, finally cooling enough to condense back into liquid. Earth's gravity then pulls it back to the surface where the cycle repeats.

According to consensus opinions, water droplets tend to collide during convection, knocking electrons off one another, creating a charge separation. Electrons accumulate in the lower portion of the cloud, where it acquires a negative charge. As the droplets that have lost an electron continue to rise, they carry a positive charge into the top of the cloud.