AIDS for everybody!

Here’s to “one of the most distorted, duplicitous and cynical public health panics of the last 30 years”:

After 25 years of official scaremongering about western societies being ravaged by the disease – with salacious, tombstone-illustrated [UK] government propaganda warning people to wear a condom or “die of ignorance” – the head of the World Health Organisation’s HIV/Aids department says there is no need for heterosexuals to fret.

It’s “a high-level admission that there is no threat of a global Aids pandemic among heterosexuals.”

Instead of being treated as a sexually transmitted disease that affected certain high-risk communities, and which should be vociferously tackled by the medical authorities, the “war against Aids” was turned into moral crusade.

Without foundation, and that was known as early as 1987, when there was

“no good evidence that Aids is likely to spread rapidly in the West among heterosexuals.” In Britain, most of the small-scale spread of “heterosexual Aids” has been a result of infected individuals arriving from Africa. In the UK in the whole of the 1980s – the decade of the Great Aids Panic – there were 20 cases of HIV acquired through heterosexual contact with an individual infected in Europe.

For that matter, on this blogger’s book shelf is a 1990 book, The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, by Michael Fumento, which argued, a Washington Monthly reviewer said, that:

the vast majority of Americans are more likely to meet Shirley MacLaine in a different life than to contract the deadly HIV-virus, and that the only reason the news hasn’t gotten out is that a conspiracy of self-interested scientists, opportunitistic politicians, sensationalist journalists, conservative moralizers, and fearful homosexuals have manufactured the scare.

They apparently sought to incite the madness of crowds, as current a problem as when witches were hunted a long time ago.  Man-made, preventable global warming, anyone? 

A sociological conundrum

In the summertime spillover of West Side (Austin district) crime, bike-snatching has been to the fore in Oak Park.  But OP police have been at the ready.

Two 13-year-olds were nabbed yesterday afternoon as they pedalled east on Lake Street after copping the bikes of two 12–year-olds in the first block of Pleasant (yes, Pleasant), which is Fulton in the city, after eyewitnesses called the police.

About 90 minutes later, a 16-year-old Chicago boy approached a 13-year-old from Oak Park on a bike near Highland Avenue and Van Buren Street [a few blocks in], grabbed her rear wheel and reportedly said, “I need this more than you.”

This too was witnessed and called in, and the perp was spotted near Menard in the city (a few blocks in) and was chased by an OP cop to the 5500 block of Monroe (a half mile in) and nabbed.

It’s his perceived need that’s arresting here, offered as explanation if not justification to his victim.  How did he know she needed it less?  Or what made him think so?

Consumer spending explained

The poorer you are, the more conspicuous is your consumption.  Blacks and Latins are generally poorer than whites.  So:

An African American family with the same income, family size, and other demographics as a white family will spend about 25 percent more of its income on jewelry, cars, personal care, and apparel. For the average black family, making about $40,000 a year, that amounts to $1,900 more a year than for a comparable white family. To make up the difference, African Americans spend much less on education, health care, entertainment, and home furnishings. (The same is true of Latinos.)

Two U. of Chicago economists and another from U. of Pennsylvania researched the matter.  The conspicuous consumption part they got from Thorstein Veblen, who coined the term.  The idea is to prove you’re prosperous, so you can hold your head up in the world.

So preachers of the good life to blacks and Latins might zero in on bling and say forget it, go for the gold of upward mobility through delayed satisfaction. 

But what about that “same income, family size, and other demographics” that seems to make it racial or race-cultural or historically determined race-cultural or something else?  I do not know, but Virginia Postrel takes a crack at it at The Atlantic-dot-com.

Prince of Darkness saw clearly

Here’s a slam from within the profession against a biased press:

[The] press corps has been ideologized into a part of the liberal establishment.  More and more, the members of the Washington press share in total the worldview taken by the dominant liberals who control the Democratic Party.  More and more they share axioms that profoundly influence their coverage of day-to-day events in the worlds of politics and government.

That was not yesterday but in 1972 from columnist Robert Novak at a Kenyon College conference on “The Mass Media and Modern Democracy,” from his The Prince of Darkness: 50 Years Reporting in Washington.

He zeros in on the journos of the day:

[A] rigid conformity has emerged among the Washington press corps, which reflects in part conformity in the colleges producing the new journalists.  But beyond this, the young journalist who violates these axioms can scarcely expect a rapid rise up the ladder of advancement.  . . . .

The result is a gap of widening proportions between the national journalist and the mass of Americans, paralleling a gap between liberal politicians and the masses, specifically the white workingman. [Italics added]

36 years ago, and still a problem.  Notice “the colleges producing the new journalists.”  Tenured radicals, twisted minds.

The golfer whom nobody sent?

Daley administration wants to fire this guy?

He’s the water dept. foreman who wore his GPS-equipped cell phone on the golf course when he was supposed to be working.

Winston Cole, a $106,115-a-year foreman of sewer bricklayers, got an earlier warning for allegedly driving to Indiana on city time to buy cheaper gas for his personal car and avoid paying Chicago gas taxes, according to co-workers.

What did he do wrong?  He wasn’t door-banging for votes, maybe.

More to the point, who is his sponsor?  Who sent him?

We know who sent Homero Tristan, just named as the city’s $147,156-a-year Human Resources commissioner, replacing a woman who left the job after a “scathing” report by the federal hiring monitor. 

That would be Alderman Danny Solis, 25th Ward, whose political action committee Tristan heads, with help of his wife Isolde — kidding. 

Solis’s sister, an old Hillary C. hand, recently headed her campaign but got pushed out last month and may be switching to the Big O.

Oh, ‘Bama, you’re so vain . . .

With his own “cocky ignorance and the media behind” him, whom need Cocky Locky fear?

He has written the Sec. of Defense, Thomas Sowell writes, “in a tone as if he is already President, addressing one of his subordinates,” calling for a “swift response,” about battlefield suicides and back-home homicides by U.S. troops.

He reacts with political acuteness to “the widely publicized statistic that suicide rates among American troops have gone up,” ignoring what has “not been widely publicized . . . that this higher suicide rate is still not as high as the suicide rate among demographically comparable civilians.”

He also buys the easily discredited NY Times story about homicides by veterans although “the homicide rate among returning veterans [has been shown to be ] a fraction of the homicide rate among demographically comparable civilians.”

So as candidate he badgers the guy running two wars, telling him to hop to it with whys and wherefores and what’s he gonna do about it?

Has he no shame?

One more for the road?

Instapundit, quite an afficionado of the long and healthy life, is happy to report more good things about red wine and wine in general:

RED WINE: Is there anything it can’t do? “Recent reports suggest that red wine is a potent force in increasing lifespan, and a new study offers still more good news for wine drinkers. A glass a day, whether white or red, may reduce the risk of developing the nation’s most common liver disorder, nonalcoholic fatty liver disease.”

He wisely adds this cautionary note, however:

Note: Drinking a bottle a day will not make you five times better than a glass . . .

Is he sure?  Because if there’s any doubt in the matter, I’m feeling experimental.

 

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Obama picks greedhead

Instapundit lifts this from Mickey Kaus:

“Barack Obama’s choice of Jim Johnson to vet his VP prospects is already embarrassing his campaign . . . Johnson was an atrocious, tin-eared choice on many other grounds. He’s symbol of old Democratic elites–the Mondale Restoration!–and of Beltway business as usual. He’s gotten obscenely rich off of public service while pursuing a failed liberal antipoverty theory (community develpment) and taking credit for spreading around other peoples money. . . .

Why would Obama, in his first big personnel decision, choose a paleoliberal greedhead with a track record of failure? You tell me. He’s described Johnson as “a friend.” It looks as if he was at best highly susceptible to amicable overtures from someone he should have had some critical perspective on.”

In other words, the Big O. has more to learn than his hopesters dreamed or they have more to learn about cynicism from him than they dreamed.

Forget Eric Holder for now . . .

(Hopester, sighing: Well at least there’s still Caroline to help pick a veep.)

News flash: media mostly not trusted

Something to chew on while reading and viewing and listening about the coming campaign:

Just 17% of voters nationwide believe that most reporters try to offer unbiased coverage of election campaigns. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that four times as many—68%–believe most reporters try to help the candidate that they want to win.

To some that’s no surprise.  Neither is this:

Voters have little doubt as to who is benefitting from the media coverage this year—Barack Obama. Fifty-four percent (54%) say Obama has gotten the best coverage so far. Twenty-two percent (22%) say McCain has received the most favorable coverage while 14% say that Hillary got the best treatment.

At the other extreme, 43% say Clinton received the worst treatment from the media. Twenty-seven percent (27%) say the media was roughest on McCain and only 15% thought the media coverage was most unfair to Obama.

And naturally, the left is least critical, the right most critical:

Ideologically, political liberals give the least pessimistic assessment of reporters, but even 50% of those on the political left see bias. Thirty-three percent (33%) of liberals believe most reporters try to be objective. Moderates, by a 65% to 17% margin, see reporters as advocates, not scribes. Among political conservatives, only 7% see reporters as objective while 83% believe they are biased.

Of course, these media are less influential these days, as people go to Internet, radio talk, and other sources, which have proliferated — to a chorus of tut-tuts from mainstreamers.

It’s how Newsweek’s Evan Thomas put it in July, 2004, when he said the media “want Kerry to win.”  Caveat lector.