The Wages of Hate: The Development of Political Homophobia by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH

by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
crossposted on Buzzflash.com
October 9, 2010

Homophobia has been around for a long time.  It turns up in the Old Testament of the Bible as well as in the New.  The Republican Religious Right relies on that view in support of its homophobia, and cites chapters and verses in support of it.  (Not every religious scholar agrees with that interpretation of the Bible.  Indeed, Minister Peter Gomes, the well-known gay [and African-American] Baptist long-time director of the Harvard Divinity School, strongly disagrees with it [see Gomes, P.J., “Homophobic? Re-read Your Bible,”  New York Times, August 17, 1992, and Westminster, J., The 15% Solution: A Political History of American Fascism, 2001-2022, East Setauket, NY, Thomas Jefferson Press, 1996, pp.155-56]).  In modern times it was used by the Nazis to promote their ideology once Hitler’s dictatorship had been established.  Indeed, despite the fact  that the head of the Sturmabteilung, the SA, the most prominent pre-1933 Nazi armed force, Ernst Roehm, was himself homosexual and Hermann Goering was a cross-dresser, the Nazis went after the gays as their identity group of choice for demonization before they went after the Jews full force.

A lesson from Seattle for Copenhagen: Vigorous Activism Can Defeat the Denialists by Patrick Bond

Dandelion Salad

Crossposted with permission from www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/

by Patrick Bond
Socialist Project | The Bullet
December 4, 2009

Preparations for the December 7-18 Copenhagen climate summit are going as expected, including a rare sighting of the African elites’ stiffened spines. That’s a great development (maybe decisive), more about that below.

While activists help raise the temperature on the streets outside the Bella Centre on December 12, 13 and 16, inside we will see global North elites defensively armed with pathetic non-binding carbon emissions cuts (U.S. President Barack Obama’s promise is a mere 4% below 1990 levels) and carbon trading, but without offering the money to repay the North’s ecological debt to the global South.

The first and third of these are lamentable enough, the second is the most serious diversion from the crucial work of cutting greenhouse gas emissions. A nine-minute film launched on the internet on December 1, The Story of Cap and Trade [watch the film at the end of this article], gives all the ammunition climate activists need to understand and critique emissions trading, and to seek genuine solutions.

A Wise, Delightful, and Wrongfully D.O.A. Book – Elizabeth Pisani’s The Wisdom of Whores by Daniel N. White

by Daniel N. White
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
Nov. 12, 2009

E.P. was a US expat kid who lived all over the world growing up and therefore naturally enough I guess wound up getting a superlatively useless liberal arts degree in Classical Chinese* and becoming a reporter for Reuters across Asia. She then jumped ship to epidemiology, getting a PHd in same in London and then working in Asia for the UN or for UN-affiliated NGO’s on AIDS transmission reduction programs for another decade or so. The book is her first-person account of her days in the trenches in the worldwide war against AIDS, and it is written in her distinct and delightful own voice. Her writing is in parts a model of skillful expository prose explaining the technical scientific issues of epidemiology and AIDS biology to the lay reader. It is also in parts a surprisingly informative sociological study of sexual practices in several Asian countries, first and foremost Indonesia. Another part is sociology of drug useage–sex and drugs being the two leading vectors for AIDS transmission–which gets frank and honest treatment, too. Other parts are first-rate explanatory reportage of the political issues in both the first and third world’s responses to the AIDS epidemic. And then there’s the autobiographical parts which are by turns wise, funny, brave, relentlessly honest, and full of human understanding and human decency.

Ethics of military drug testing questioned

Dandelion Salad
by David R. Sands
http://www.washtimes.com
Sunday, June 22, 2008

Degree of ‘voluntary’ participation raises concerns

Colombian and Indonesian troops have been drafted to test new anti-malaria drugs. South African researchers used Tanzanian soldiers to study the effectiveness of an unorthodox treatment for HIV/AIDS.

And a trial conducted on some 2,000 Nepalese soldiers for a new hepatitis-E vaccine by a major U.S. drug company sparked public protests and complaints that the Nepalese troops were being used as human guinea pigs.

…continued

h/t: CLG

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see

Breaking the Nuremberg Code: The US Military’s Human-Testing (videos)

Breaking the Nuremberg Code: The US Military’s Human-Testing Program Returns By Heather Wokusch

Atomic Testing (video)

Information Warfare Using Aggressive PsychOps Part 4 by Brent Jessop + Facebook datamining (video)

Dandelion Salad

by Brent Jessop
Knowledge Driven Revolution.com
November 26, 2007

Information Operation Roadmap Part 4

The Pentagon’s plans for psychological operations or PSYOP in the global information environment of the 21st century are wide ranging and aggressive. These desires are outlined in the 2003 Pentagon document signed by Donald Rumsfeld in his capacity as the Secretary of Defense called the Information Operation Roadmap.

AIDS Strikes More Kids and Some Have the Gall to Ask Why by The Other Katherine Harris

The Other Katherine Harris

by The Other Katherine Harris

Featured writer
Dandelion Salad

The Other Katherine Harris’s blog
Dec. 1, 2007

An unidentified idiot writing for Yahoo’s “HealthDay News” stated yesterday:

“…(O)n the eve of World AIDS Day, a disturbing statistical fact has emerged in this country: The number of newly infected teens and young adults is suddenly on the rise.

And the question is, why?…”

Well, duh.

Boys and girls, can you say “abstinence-only education”?

The stupid author of this stupid article couldn’t. Not once does the phrase appear, amid a lengthy spate of speculative drivel that mainly lays the blame on better treatments that instilled a sense of security, alongside the tired “kids think they’re invincible” maxim.

Despite quoting an expert who said that “they’ve all heard ‘use a condom, use a condom,’ ” the stupid author of this stupid article evidently never bothered asking the source, “How can you be so sure?”

The stupid author of this stupid article went on to argue against complacency, as stupidly as possible, based on the specter that “someday, HIV…will develop mutations that render these drugs useless, triggering the re-emergence of AIDS.”

Setting aside the lunacy of implicitly suggesting AIDS has submerged to some level from which re-emergence is conceivable, it doesn’t require new strains of the disease to render extant treatments ineffective! Patients constantly develop resistance to the drugs they’re taking. The lucky ones move on to something different — knowing it, too, will wear out its usefulness soon — while those for whom there’s nothing effective left in the pharma-arsenal decline and die. An elaborate test is given periodically to determine which drugs can still help each individual, because responses vary greatly.

Somehow the stupid author of this stupid article managed nowhere to uncover these facts, despite interviewing executives at the Foundation for AIDS Research and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered Community Center, both in New York City, plus REACH LA in Los Angeles.

We can’t blame the stupid author of this stupid article for the fact that it opens with a photograph of a giant red AIDS ribbon hanging from the White House North Portico — the same pic shown HERE, with a story in which stupid Shrub congratulates himself and stupid “faith-based groups” for their valuable work in this field.

However, the stupid author bears full blame for concluding the stupid article with what’s essentially a shrug — another quote from the “they’ve all heard about condoms” person: “You can save some, but you can’t save them all.”

We sure as hell could save a lot of more of them, if our stupid excuse-for-a-government would stop funding lying programs that tell kids condoms aren’t reliable enough to trust and if our stupid excuse-for-news-media would publicize the truth that people are still dying of AIDS every day, because the new drugs — wonderful as they are for a while — don’t keep people going indefinitely. That’s why researchers struggle on to develop more drugs. Twice, breakthroughs have been made just in time to benefit a loved one who’s been trying to survive this horrible disease for a dozen years. So that’s how I know (and why reading junk about AIDS puts me into a cold fury).

Please tell all the young people in your life that AIDS hasn’t become a “manageable” disease like diabetes. It seems manageable only because new tricks keep springing from researchers’ sleeves, and only for those who can get them before it’s too late. And, yeah, tell the kids to use condoms, too, because they’ve probably heard in school that those aren’t much good.

see

AIDS origin (video) + Who Says Africans/Haitians Gave AIDS to the World? by Jafrikayiti + 6 min video

AIDS origin (video) + Who Says Africans/Haitians Gave AIDS to the World? by Jafrikayiti + 6 min video

Dandelion Salad

replaced video Apr. 2, 2014

1 hr 29 min 49 sec – 29 Jan 2007

AllDocumentaries.org Aug 18, 2013

“One Of The Greatest Human Tragedies Of Our Time”

This video on the possible origins of the HIV pandemic is a “Must Watch”.

It needs to seen by as many people as possible.