The Arab Spring has unleashed the Arab Collapse. Everybody still standing in the region is picking the flesh of the helpless. The Islamist cancer proved more virulent than Arabs themselves expected, while dying regimes behave with unrestrained ruthlessness.

And our diplomats still think everyone can be cajoled into harmony.

We're witnessing a titanic event, the crack-up of a long-tottering civilization. Arab societies grew so corrupt and stagnant that violent upheaval became inevitable. That's what we're seeing in Syria and Iraq - two names, one struggle - and will find elsewhere tomorrow.

We can't stop it, we can't fix it, and we don't understand it. But we can stay out of it.  Here's how we can and why we should.

This is sad tidings.  When I returned from the Serengeti, I learned that on Friday, June 22, Dennis Turner, my friend of over 40 years and author of TTP's Dennis The Wizard column, passed away.

Dennis had been in horrible pain and suffering for so long that his passing was likely a blessing.  He never mentioned it in his columns, and how he wrote them in spite of it was heroic. 

Some years ago, he contracted an infection in his spine which caused a progressive deterioration of his spinal nerves.  He lost the use of his legs, and then all the functions of his digestive system. 

Few of us can even imagine what it is to try and continue living like that.  Yet Dennis did.  He persevered, maintaining a wide range of interests and a dense network of friends.  He never lost his intense intellectual curiosity and passion for life.
 
His was a mind apart.  Not surprising -- for he was a six-foot-two, 280-pound Mongolian Jew with an IQ of 180. 

There is an "intelligence website" emanating from Israel called Debka.  This Monday (September 24), it breathlessly blared Iran and Turkey Prepare for War in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Debka's "exclusive military sources in Iraq" have revealed just to the website alone that "Turkish and Iranian air units as well as armored, paratroop, special operations and artillery forces are poised for an imminent coordinated invasion of the northern Iraqi autonomous province of Kurdistan."

Since I am in Iraqi Kurdistan meeting with Kurdish resistance movements operating in Iran, I showed them the story.  They laughed their heads off.

It isn't often that an entire field of medical science gets turned on its head. But it is becoming clear that immunology is undergoing a big rethink thanks to the discovery that antibodies, which combat viruses, work not just outside cells but inside them as well. The star of this new view is a protein molecule called TRIM21.

Until recently, the conventional wisdom was that the body fights off infection in two separate ways. First is the adaptive immune system, which works outside the cell. It generates antibodies to intercept specific invaders, locking onto them like a tracking missile and preventing them from entering the cell. A second line of defense, the innate immune system, operates within the cell; it is like an expansive air-defense network, blasting away at all invaders.

Three years ago work by Leo James, William McEwan and their colleagues at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge revealed that this understanding was incomplete. They found that the neutralization of adenoviruses (common viruses causing colds and other infections) by antibodies was happening mainly inside the cell, not outside, and by an unexpected mechanism.

This mechanism opens a whole new path to curing viral infections, and autoimmune diseases like lupus.