Aug. 10, 2006: #6

Today's posts, unfortunately, have articles from the last week or so. Sorry, but I haven't had the time to group by date, nor to post earlier.



AIDS

Caveat: Some readers will not like what I write, perhaps, but I didn't start this blog to parrot what we are being told. This week I read somewhere (Globe and Mail?) about which groups were getting AIDS in Canada. Try to find it, but it is exactly what I expected and included groups who should know better by now. I suspect illegal drug use makes many careless.

Then, there has been talk of the AIDS conference ... and more UN lefties telling the rest of us what we owe the third World [so the socialists may swan about the world ... and look concerned while pointing fingers of blame at the rest of us] and how AIDS is all the result of poverty. Bilge!

At the AIDS conference at the Univ. of Toronto, this week, the usual champagne socialists were on hand to try to get more money out of Canadians, along with a spreading huge dollop of poverty causes everything blather.


Yet, I had watched The Passionate Eye this week with its documentary on AIDS. Frankly, from what I learned about Africa's AIDS rate and the reasons, the men's careless attitude about their health and AIDS, if using a condom interfered with their sexual pleasure, along with their lack of responsibility toward their partners and any children that might result ... and it all leaves me cold about throwing more good money after bad. It's been 25 years, for heaven's sakes. If they're so stupid they don't get it when they're dying of AIDS, what good are the champagne socialists like Stephen Lewis and his UN crowd going to do? Talk is pointless in these situations.


In my opinion, the UN/WHO are attacking the problem incorrectly, given that there will never be enough money for what they want, that is, keeping people with AIDS alive who haven't learned a blinking thing yet, even when they're dying of AIDS -- as long as the West provides the drug cocktails free or at a reduced cost. As for the prostitutes subject to their culture controlled by men's desires, what can anyone do from outside that culture? They could at least try to protect themselves from AIDS. Is NO an impossible word in Africa? Help the young through education and administer drugs to the AIDS-afflicted ones born with AIDS; let the chips fall where they may for anyone who should have learned by now.



Living with AIDS, (DVD ) [2005] This is the program shown on the Passionate Eye, as far as I could find out.
www.ias.emory.edu/catalog.cfm?keyword=WHO

Abstract: In the third of his Living with... series, Sorious Samura works as an orderly in a hospital in Zambia , where the majority of the patients are HIV positive. Confronted on a daily basis with death, he describes his workplace as being like a frontline in a war zone. The staff works under horrendous conditions where protective gloves are a luxury and shrouds for the dead are stained with the blood of previous corpses. In this film, Samura exposes the untold story of AIDS --how poverty and the complex nature of African culture and sexuality are hampering efforts to eradicate this horrifying disease. He meets characters like Joshua and Lawson who continue to practice unprotected sex despite their HIV positive status, and Precious and Nancy, AIDS orphans who fend for themselves in a world where sex flesh to flesh pays well and offers an easy short term solution. Samura also meets heroines such as Bitonda, who at sixteen is in sole charge of her dying 14 year old brother, an AIDS orphaned cousin as well as her own child. After one month, Samura is left with the realization that for the war against HIV in Africa to be won, poverty, ignorance and African sexual attitudes have to be tackled head on.

Director: Sorious Samura Distributor: Insight News Television
Keywords: Zambia, children, HIV/AIDS, journalism, orphans

I would argue that poverty does not make one stupid, in Africa or elsewhere. Is anyone at the AIDS conference mentioning AIDS associated with illegal drug use? I would be interested in their solution to that.



AIDS -- Does anyone ever suggest prostitution is evil? Or are we just supposed to fund drugs to keep them alive ... and then they may live to pursue their business?

Dying of ignorance , Peter Goodspeed, National Post, August 05, 2006
www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.ht
ml?id=9a8ee994-d8bc-4842-a8fa-98116a3816d5&k=71185

One in every eight people in the world infected with HIV lives in India, making it, after Africa, the second epicentre for AIDS. Senior International Affairs reporter Peter Goodspeed travelled there ahead of the International AIDS Conference.... In the first of three stories from there, he describes how prostitutes are on the front lines of the battle against the killer disease.
---

MUMBAI, India - The way Yellavva, a 30-year-old prostitute, describes it, she "lost her life" when she was only eight.

It was then, just as doctors were identifying India's first full-blown case of AIDS, that Yellavva's parents dedicated their only child to the Hindu goddess Yellamma, the Mother of All, in exchange for a wish for a son.

As a "temple virgin" initiated into the infamous and now illegal Devadasi cult, Yellavva became a slave girl to the gods. [and to the priests]

[....] once she entered puberty, Yellavva became a concubine to the temple priests, who regularly hire out the Devadasi to anyone who wants to sleep with them. [....]

HIV/AIDS IN INDIA BY THE NUMBERS [....]

Do not miss the staggering statistics. This ... in a country with so many educated citizens ... with call centers for Microsoft and programmers for any numbers of companies? Do Indians themselves not rail against this practice? Ye Gods!



PBS: AIDS -- Watch the Full Program Online
www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/aids/view/

CBC's Passionate Eye: I tried to find the program on their website, which led to this. It may or may not be the same program mentioned above -- a devastating vision of abysmal ignorance ... not ameliorated by all the best of intentions, it seems.

On the 25th anniversary of the first diagnosed cases of AIDS, FRONTLINE examines one of the worst pandemics the world has ever known in "The Age of AIDS." After a quarter century of political denial and social stigma, of stunning scientific breakthroughs, bitter policy battles and inadequate prevention campaigns, HIV/AIDS continues to spread rapidly throughout much of the world, particularly in developing nations. To date, some 30 million people worldwide have already died of AIDS. (more)

In the Passionate Eye program, the men dying of AIDS refused to see that condom use could have helped them ... still talked about wanting nothing between them and their desires. Women working in the sex trade simply charged more to those who did not use a condom, despite knowing the consequences.

With that attitude, would someone explain to me why Canadians' tax dollars should be sluiced to help people too selfish and stupid to help their fellows, if not themselves. Some African government ministers still don't admit what causes AIDS and what the individual can do to prevent it.

When people who have AIDS, even then, do not learn from their own experience, from others, from the news, from health professionals, from reading and act upon a desire to prevent further disastrous health consequences to their children and their fellows, please explain why the rest of us should give a hoot. It's like throwing money into a sewer of the mind.



Cuba, CBC & Propaganda for Fidel

How to farm in a police state , Terence Corcoran, Financial Post, August 05, 2006
www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.ht
ml?id=393408d0-864b-45ff-86d0-02928146665e

Fidel Castro will die some day, but rest assured the CBC is on standby to make sure the murderous old totalitarian is mourned by Canadians as a benevolent dictator, the imperfect but lovable revolutionary who stuck it to the Americans. Last Tuesday night, with news of Castro's latest illness, The National hauled out Joe Schlesinger for a typical dose of Canadian folklore: Castro may have had his failings, but he has also in many ways been successful. "He put schools in places where there had not been any. He brought medical care to people who before him had none."

As if nobody else in the world had ever set a school where none existed before. But never mind, because that bit of whitewashing is nothing compared with David Suzuki's latest, a two-part propaganda homage to the greatness of Cuba's agricultural economy. The second of these runs Sunday night on The Nature of Things.

In Cuba: The Accidental Revolution, Suzuki portrays Cuba's messed-up food supply system as "the largest program of organic and sustainable agriculture ever undertaken," a system that offers "critical lessons for the developed world." Or at least those are the words Suzuki reads, words written by Ray Burley, a Canadian farm owner who also wrote and directed other Suzuki documentaries on the evils of modern agriculture.

The first hour of The Accidental Revolution regurgitates classic Cuban revolutionary myth (Batista, repression, prostitution). It takes us through Cuba's role as a Soviet satellite until its abrupt end in 1989. The fall of Soviet Communism left Cuba without oil supplies, equipment and resources. Castro's giant collectivized farm system collapsed. No fuel, no food. [....]

Cubans who operate larger rural farms must sell part of their production to the state. The rest they sell directly in city markets. But "in Cuba, there are no middlemen or wholesalers," says Suzuki, digging up some raw Marxism for recyling. Cuban farmers "get most of the money consumers pay for their products. Canadian farmers only get a tiny fraction." But Canadian farmers are thousands of times richer, thanks to middlemen -- it's known as the division of labour. [....]

Typical CBC leftist bilge.



RCMP

Mountie issued gag order over Mayerthorpe inquiry , Scott Sutherland, Aug. 4, 06
cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Law/2006/08/04/1719803-cp.html

"They are trying to control information to the public. It's all about spinning, about spin-doctoring that is, and making sure the image of the RCMP is not tarnished with fact."

Caledonia, policing and Gwen Boniface

Irish media reporting on Gwen Boniface's troubles in Caledonia, Steve Janke / AngryGWN
www.stevejanke.com/archives/189286.php#more


Gwen Boniface's handling of the Caledonia land dispute has made front page news in Ireland. [Boniface left, or was pushed to leave, and took a new job in Ireland. ]