Valley Forge
Does it feel like the whole world's against the cause of freedom? So it must have seemed to the soldiers at Valley Forge in 1777. Demonstrations and European blowhards and Socialist twits are attacking on all fronts. It's cold and we haven't had any nourishing victory news for weeks now, since the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. But we must hang on, our supplies will get here sooner or later. The only real difference between our situation now and that of the Continentals at Valley Forge is that the eventual rescue and victory was helped along by the French. Today we're fighting them and the Brits are with us. But just a few years after VF, the French changed governments in the most drastic way possible. I wonder if they still have some guillotines stashed away somewhere? And like the Continental Army, we must rely on George.

Bonus
Looking over Duesberg's AIDS site, I came upon a page I hadn't seen before, filled with links and pictures of researchers. If you don't know why some people still say there's no such thing as AIDS and HIV doesn't cause it, consult this page.

Alternative future
Mark Steyn, in a typically readable and hard-hitting article in the Spectator, ponders the future of an increasingly impotent Europe, losing population to support its Socialist culture and relying on immigration from, in large part, the Muslim world. I made the point in a comment that it won't always be a good idea to rely on Muslims continuing to crowd into a cold, wet Europe if their home countries become more hospitable:
I haven't seen much comment on the possible effects of a successful US liberation of Iraq and democratization of the rest of the Arab world. Many of the Muslims in Europe will go home to build their nations and the rate of immigration to Europe will slow dramatically. The demographic consequences for Europe for the next few decades will be even more drastic than those you suggest. There will be no more immigrants, no one to support the oldsters and the shiftless. And no constituency for Shari'a.
Am I just being knee-jerk anti-Europe? I've stopped buying French wine and am resolved to drink up what I have - big deal, three bottles! Tony Blair is sticking with us, so steak and kidney pie and Walker's shortbread are still OK. Of course, the country with the really good food and wine would have to be the one that has ticked me off so much I'm boycotting it. I wonder how Bulgarian paté tastes?

Update - Horrible thought
Reading this Musil post, via Instapundit, made me have a pretty sick thought about what is in the back of the French mind, perhaps the German too. They don't want the Middle East to get all cleaned up and democratically spick and span because then they wouldn't have all those cheap and easily-looked-down-upon immigrants coming in any more. The Syrians and Iraqis and Afghans and Egyptians and even Lebanese wouldn't have any reason to crowd into housing developments in le (or is it "la"?) Zone if they could make a good living at home. If Iraq and Iran and even Egypt rebuilt their polities to full modern status, they would form another rival concentration of power. Just what the declining Eurogeriatrics need. Also, if the US were instrumental in bringing that new situation about, the rebuilt states would be firmly in the US camp, like the ungrateful and impudent Eastern Europeans. Talk about a good reason to oppose a US-led war! They really think ahead, those Old Europeans! Many French and German companies have enormous economic stakes in the area, as laid out in the Instapundit-linked articles and posts. Those companies have vested interests in totalitarianism, disorder, violence and Islamofascism, which is to say, the status quo. Pretty sick. Freedom fries, anyone? Hot dogs and ground beef patties?

Proto-story
For some days now, ever since the arrest of Kalidh Sheikh Mohammed (ptui!), I've been seeing articles saying that Osama bin Laden (double ptui!) has been captured. These stories have been immediately and energetically denied by US and Pakistani authorities. Yet they still keep popping up. It's interesting how little it takes to keep a story going. Perhaps an Army patrol reports arresting a tall wild-bearded Arab somewhere near Baluchistan. Someone sees the report and thinks, hey that could be Osama! He mentions it to a friend, who jokes about it to a reporter, who relays it to his paper as a possibility. With $25 million on tap as a reward, is it any wonder any half-plausible story is boosted to the maximum? When the real story comes along, it may take a while to realize it. I do think he's dead. But if he isn't, there can't be a Pashtu in Pakistan who doesn't know his fortune is made if he can betray him to the Americans.

I wonder what one can say will be an indication that the story actually is true? If it's reported on Drudge, Debka and Instapundit at the same time, is that a lead-pipe cinch? Or if it's on albawaba.com or reuters, does that mean we can safely ignore it? I'll be watching.

Rush Crush
Limbaugh just had a caller who said our victory in Gulf War I was responsible for 9/11. "We never had any terrorism on US soil until Gulf War I!", he whined. So Rush asked him if he supported the present effort to disarm Iraq. He said, reluctantly, he would, for the soldiers' sakes. Rush's comeback was to the effect: "Why? By your logic, another attack will only produce more terrorism. So you should be against it no matter what!" Good point. However, the guy was right. The events of 1991 et seq. DID lead to 9/11. The terrorists saw a huge army defeat Saddam utterly and then stop short of taking him out, leaving him to claim a distorted sort of victory. This impression of US weakness and indecisiveness was confirmed by Klintoon's disastrous eight years of wishy-washy willy waving.
So if we were to do again what we did in 1991, that is, go in and disarm Saddam but leave him there or let another homegrown tinpot Islamofascist gain power, we would indeed encourage terrorism. If we remove all vestiges of the mad mustachioed murderer, empower the Kurds and Shi'ites and insist on guaranteed rights and democratic forms and procedures, we will be sending the strongest kind of message that terrorism will not be tolerated. Oh, and it wouldn't hurt to raze Tikrit to the ground and sow it with salt and establish a few huge military bases chock-full of B-52s and B-1s, so they wouldn't have to fly in from Diego Garcia or Missouri to bomb places like, just to take a random example, Saudi Arabia, whose permission and "help" and tolerance we will no longer need or want and whose arrogance and bloody-mindedness we could start working on, finally. And how about Disneyland Middle East? I'm sure the Iranian mullahs' kids will bug the heck out of them to go.

Never forget
A positive aspect of this interminable wait for the liberation of Iraq is that the character of our opponents, particularly France, Germany and the UN, emerges as the farce drags on. It's clear now that France will never agree to any war led by America, and especially Bush. It's clear now that Germany will never willingly support any Bush policies at all. And it's becoming clearer that Russia has fallen for the catastrophic delusion that their interests are the same as Germany's and France's. We need to remember these days after the war, when the stories of torture, murder and horrendous weapons come out, when we continue to encounter resistance to our efforts to democratize Iraq and in pursuing the terrorists, even to France, Germany and Russia. What is there about those who say they are against terrorism that can't realize that terrorists need state sponsors?

It's also becoming clearer that the "coalition" of Gulf War I was a disaster in the long term. It created the need for "no-fly zones" for twelve years. It allowed Saddam to continue to exist. It allowed Saddam to crush the Kurds and Marsh Arabs. It perpetuated the myth of inspections and the farce of the "embargo". The whole mockery of a foreign policy Clinton pretended to conduct gave ammunition to every collectivist blowhard and carper to cast America as the source of all evil. Their lies and distortions gave rise to massive hatred and encouraged widespread misinterpretation of any move America made to defend itself and promote freedom. Did I say we need to remember that they did this? We never can forget the delays forced upon us by the midgets and vampires of the UN, delays which have already cost thousands of Iraqi lives and given Saddam more time to prepare his pathetic but no doubt deceptive and cowardly defenses. We can only pray that this administration learns from this experience the futility of trying to please "world opinion" in the persons of Chirac, Schroeder, Putin, Blix and Annan.
Update - no sooner said ...
CNN has a story (via Instapundit) about the EU "threatening" to withhold aid for the rebuilding of Iraq if the US goes in without UN permission. Glenn Reynolds calls it "sabotage" and continues:
I think we should cooperate. No contracts relating to reconstruction should go to companies from countries that oppose the war. I wouldn't want to subject them to a moral dilemma.
If more evidence is needed of the perfidy of "Old Europe", I'm sure they'll supply it any moment now. And notice the piddling amount of the "aid" - fifteen million Euros. These same people's supporters in the antiwar movement are saying the war and reconstruction may cost "$1trillion". That's nonsense, but it's certainly going to be a hundred or a thousand times what the EU is "setting aside". Who needs 'em?

World-historical turnabout
This Tech Central Station essay has a lot of good things to say about, as I say in the previous post, how this war is different from every other war and how things will continue to be different until a new world stability establishes itself. The prevalence of individual technologies like satphones and the web and email makes the new kind of attack on sovereignty possible. One interesting sidelight: an article I can't find again mentions that terrorists communicated by logging on to a web-based email site, leaving a message and then having the recipient log onto the same site. No message is ever sent and so no message can be traced. Of course, this is no different from putting a blog post up or putting anything on any web site, except for the password protection. And I'm going to bet that the black magic intelligence gurus have figured out a way to detect even those messages. After all, as the essay points out, we created the Internet. The terrorists cannot create their own technology without becoming like us, which they won't do. So they're stuck in their role of dog-in-the-manger savagery. Good. They'll reap the whirlwind.

How is this war different from all other wars?
A Catotheyoungest fisking of one of those Democratic presidents everyone has been trying to forget about for years but who won't keep his mouth shut, (there are so many I'd better say it's Carter) reminds me how this war upcoming is essentially different from WWII, even Vietnam. We don't clearly know in every case exactly who the enemy is. When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, they didn't bother to hide the rising sun emblems on the wings of their planes. In the Gulf of Tonkin, it was obvious where the (hypothetical?) torpedo boats came from that triggered deeper US involvement. And there was no doubt that China and Russia were funding, feeding and arming the VC and the PAVN. In the Falklands, Britain didn't have to think, "Hey, wait a minute, are we sure the troops holding our sheep captive are Argentinian?" Even in Grenada there was no serious doubt about whether or not Cubans were involved. In Gulf War I we didn't have to spend much intelligence money finding out whose tanks those were in Kuwait City.
But now the effective defense of the United States depends on knowing exactly who is attacking you and how best to eliminate them. I'm sure one of the nightmares of the War against Terror planners is that some unknown terrorist group with a whole other grudge against America totally unrelated to Islamofascism was responsible for 9/11. Not. That much we know. AlQaeda did it and they are steamed up against America because of the success of American culture, which makes them feel like the failures they are. And the biggest thumb in their eye is the existence and relative prosperity of Israel. And who's giving money to suicide bombers attacking Israel? Old porno mustache himself. So to ask whether Iraq has "ties" to AlQaeda or would or did participate in an attack on America is ridiculous. Iraq is part and parcel of Islamofascism. Saddam Hussein is a hero to all those who hate America and think that all the Arab world needs is another Saladin to stand up to the "Crusaders" and they will fold like the paper tigers they are, because America is corrupt and immoral and soft and on the "wrong side of history" just like the imam said in the mosque on Friday or whatever heathenish day of the week they have their mosque rants. The "Axis of Evil" is no different from the Hitler/Mussolini/Tojo Axis of World War II in that regard. They think their way will inevitably win, because they are superior to the mongrel Americans. The Moscow/Peking axis was just as convinced during the Cold War. Did it not say so in the sacred Marx's books?
So to ask whether a man who has a Koran written in his own blood (he says!) is sufficiently Islamic to find common cause with Osama and Arafish and his buddies makes no sense at all. Still, though, one must wonder. Is attacking Iraq now in this way the right tactic to cause a historic collapse of Islamofascism to parallel the fall of Berlin in 1945 and of the Berlin Wall in 1989? Hmm - that's interesting. Two worldwide ideologies came to symbolic grief in Berlin. I never realized that before. Maybe instead of Waterloo we should be using Berlin as a metaphor for final unmitigated defeat. I don't see how that could happen this time. Or maybe Osama is hiding out in Berlin and he'll dine on Unter den Linden and he'll choke on a piece of pork in a sidewalk cafe and his whole movement will evaporate in disillusioned disgust, maintaining the curse.
Anyway. The recent capture of Sheikh Mohammed makes it clear that crushing Iraq is merely one act in a series of battles. It's important. State sponsorship of an organization like AlQaeda must be eliminated, to reduce the threat of atomic terrorism. And Iran has a lot to answer for in that regard, too, as does North Korea. The coming war will be swift and overwhelming. It will cause a huge reaction in the Arab world, but not the one the liberals think. It'll be more like, "Say, can you come into our country and help us like you did the Iraqis? We could really use a break from Assad/Mubarak/Qaddafi/Khamenei/ the Sauds and even Musharraf." Could be a busy couple of years coming up.

Talking Turkey
Colby Cosh has an interesting bit on Turkey's problems in allowing democracy to operate freely even though it might lead to Islamofascism. Surely this is a classic opportunity to show the worth of a constitution that protects things like freedom of religion, separation of church and state and freedom of expression, all of which figure nowhere in the Islamofascist calculus. The example of Algeria is apropos. A military regime goes all wimpish and democratic and finds to its horror that Islamofascism is going to win the vote. Then it cracks down and here we are, what? 8 years later? With tens of thousands dead and freedom of all sorts in ruins. Now doesn't this remind us of another election in, oh, 1933? And another in 1917? And one in Vietnam in about 1956? Isn't it possible that true constitutional freedom means stopping those who would trash the constitution from taking power, even by "democratic" means? Islamofascism, after all, would completely change our legal system, our social polity and our culture. Even if a temporarily insane majority voted for such a change, would the rest of the country be justified in restraining the elected nutcases until they came to their senses? Couldn't that power be abused and itself lead to totalitarianism, as Hitler rose to power citing the dangers of letting the Bolsheviks contend for electoral power?
It's entirely possible that a majority of the American voting public may be in favor of eliminating some constitutional freedoms or others, from privacy to freedom of assembly to flag-burning. But of course this just shows the invalidity of talking about freedoms as though the Constitution was intended to create them. The purpose of the Constitution is to centralize enough power - just enough, ideally - to assure that domestic and foreign enemies of freedom can be defeated. The Constitution is a limited, constrained grant of power to the government, not a mechanism to bring freedom to the people. As the Tenth Amendment reminds us, all freedoms and rights originate with the people. The Constitution does not give the government the power, for instance, to establish Islam as the state religion. Any party that proclaims that goal as part of its election campaign to gain power under the Constitution is going against the Constitution and must somehow be stopped from implementing its goal, even if it does gain a majority and power. How to do this is the problem. Is some "prior restraint" appropriate, so that any party that advertises, "Vote for us and we'll give you jihad" will be taken off the ballot and, perhaps, prosecuted for sedition? That's the way Turkey seems to be going. That's definitely what happened in Algeria, clumsily and ineffectively. Or should the Supreme Court examine the actions of the newly empowered regime and declare it invalid? Can the impeachment mechanism work effectively against a force of zealots who do actually represent a majority of the people? Constitutions provide a check on majoritarian democracy. They draw a line beyond which government power cannot go. And constitutions implicitly authorize whatever actions are necessary to preserve their principles. Even the amendment process is not superior to the body of the constitution. Otherwise, a series of amendments could completely change the nature of the republic. Many Americans are convinced that the 16th amendment went beyond constitutional limits in imposing a tax on individual income.
But in Algeria there was no effective constitution that a recognized authority could hold up and point to, so the military created a public relations and then a human rights disaster. Turkey is not Algeria. It has no history of colonial occupation for Islamofascists to rebel against, for one thing. The warts on the democratic process are on full display these days, since the 2000 elections. Event after event strains the social and political fabric, in Algeria to the breaking point. We live in interesting times.

Update
Debka this morning (3/9) seems to think the Turkish political system will morph into a shape that will allow US forces to use bases in their country to jump off into northern Iraq. Is this military preemption of democracy or true political change adhering to the principles of constitutional government? I'm sure many will analyze it after the fact. Bottom line, in Debka-world, there WILL be a northern front and, perhaps more significant, the cynics such as I who said Turkey would never let this war happen without being in there to protect their interests vis-a-vis the Kurds, appear to have been right again. "Developing" - as Drudge says.

Update 2
Colby Cosh emailed me to say that the Turkish turnabout is not unusual in parliamentary systems. Any parliamentarian can cobble up a government, which can change policy on a dime. He compares the situation to Jim Jeffords handing control of the Senate to the Dems. Pray to God it won't be anything like that. I saw somewhere else that the Islamic parties in Turkey were actually not against the move to let US troops use Turkey as a staging area. Confusing. But it is the Middle East, he said simplistically.

Wrong? Me?
Can it be that I have been wrong about the African AIDS "crisis"? This article in the Spectator certainly argues that the threat is real. Botswana's population has dropped from 1.4 million to under a million since 1993? Unfortunately, the writer gave no reference for this statistic. That's one problem. The other is that the author tells several anecdotes citing heterosexual transmission of AIDS in one encounter. Everything else I've read says this is nonsense, that transmission even from husband to wife, and especially vice versa, takes dozens or hundreds of contacts. Can people like Peter Duesberg and Kary Mullis be wrong about this? Time will tell. If Botswana is empty in ten years, we'll know.

My opinion? This article is a mishmash of old myths, recycled anecdotes and scare stories unexamined and uncritically accepted for decades now. For instance, why a population statistic on Botswana, but not on Zambia, where all the funerals he talks about are happening? Sloppy work. I would truly appreciate some statistical source, however. I don't like to be wrong. But I like even less to think I'm right when I'm really wrong.

Awwww!
Seems like some of the "human shields" who supported Saddam's bloody dictatorship have been stranded in Beirut trying to get home. Gee, we sure hope none of those Hamas or Hezbollah or Fatah or Al-Aqsa Martyr Brigade monsters blow them up in the night or take their remaining money or kidnap and torture them or strap bomb belts on them and force them to walk toward Israeli checkpoints or use them as human sandbags in a grenade attack on Israeli children at recess or send them back to Damascus to serve in Bashir Assad's harem after being appropriately operated on. Any of that would be a shame and probably against several UN resolutions and just not fair, darn it!

Those kwazy A-rabs
A frank and revealing article in Ha'aretz gives a lot of quotes from different Arab leaders about the mess Iraq has gotten the Arab world into. The Arab League held a meeting at which the insults and demands flew fast and thick. This quote from Egyptian president Mubarak gives the tone:

When a journalist suggested - at a press conference with Mubarak - that the Arab states could invoke the oil weapon, the president retorted angrily, "Do you want the Gulf states to stop the flow of oil? Did Saddam Hussein consult with the Arab states when he invaded Iran? Did he consult with them when he invaded Kuwait? The Arab states paid Saddam $60 billion and assisted him in the war against Iran. Then he invaded Kuwait and split the country in two. He attacked the American forces, and his policy brought about the largest American presence in the history of the region."

Curses upon your moustache, monkey!
"Monkey" and "traitor" are not the words usually exchanged between friends. This Ananova article, though, reports the depths to which the insult-mongering descended at the above meeting. Gee, who would have thought the presence of 300,000 American troops in near proximity to a whole bunch of Arab nations with a whole lot of oil could have this kind of effect? Any tickets left on the Concorde to Switzerland?

Twisted
A bizarre story on Albawaba.com contends that a large tornado that hit Cyprus was a product of an Israeli weather experiment that went awry. It also links it to the loss of the Columbia, which apparently was passing over at the time. They're saying that the Israeli Air Force, NASA and the Israeli astronaut, the late Ilan Ramon, were involved in creating this tornado, then lost control of it and it struck Limassol on Cyprus. This story has so many things wrong with it I don't know where to start. Perhaps its lesson is the kind of mental activity that passes for thinking in some internet denizens. The words paranoia and ignorance don't even do this view of the world justice. OK, so the Israeli astronaut casts a spell from orbit that causes a storm, which gets Allah angry, who then strikes down the Space Shuttle on reentry. He doesn't try to stop the storm and kills all the other astronauts too, but that's neither here nor there. The hubble-bubbles must have been going like crazy the night after that one. Even the Enquirer would find it difficult to match that. Hmm, I haven't been to the grocery store lately, so, who knows, maybe the same story is sitting next to the checkout counters right now. Here's the tagline:

Unfortunately, any information regarding the “experiment” perished and vanished into space’s never-ending vastness, along with other “secrets” aboard Columbia STS-107. (Albawaba.com)

Ah, I see. The experiment went awry, so the sinister powers controlling things decided that the Space Shuttle, with all the incriminating evidence, had to be destroyed! Yeah, and Bush is really Hitler preserved by freezing in a Siberian bog and brought back to life by the CIA. Right.

AD:

A young girl comes out of a movie. A ghostly figure, another young girl bloody and hollow-eyed, points an accusing finger at her:

“YOU did this to me!” the spectre cries.
“But how, what, what did I do? I haven’t done anything!” the moviegoer protests.
“I died in Saddam’s torture chambers! And you helped him!” the spook sighs and disappears.

The girl is shaken, not understanding. She keeps walking toward her car, wondering what she could have done wrong. Then out of a misty fringe of trees, two bloody ghosts appear, one a mother, one a small child, limp in his mother’s arms, both pointing with their last energies directly at her:

“WHY, why, why did you kill us? We died in a suicide bombing by Fatah in Israel. Why did you help them?” the mother accuses.

“No, no, it wasn’t me! I didn’t do anything!”, cries the girl. Even more shaken, she hurries to her car and, trembling, starts up and surges out onto the road. Turning a corner by a mountain, she almost drives off the road when she sees two figures hovering in the air, holding hands, though they seem to be falling. Again, they are pointing accusing fingers at the astonished girl:

“We died because of you! You helped them! Now who will avenge us? We had to jump off the World Trade Center to avoid being burned to death and died on the streets of New York, because of your friends AlQaeda!” The girl can’t stand it any more.

“ I did nothing! I’m a good American! I hate terrorism and Saddam. Why are all these dead people accusing me? I didn’t help their killers!” She brakes the car to a stop and dissolves into tears.

The camera goes back to the marquee of the movie theater. The movie stars George Clooney, Sean Penn, and Susan Sarandon. Next statements by each of them opposing the war on Iraq, supporting the Palestinians and calling Bush the “real terrorist” are shown, the actual statements by the real actors.

Then the camera shows Saddam listening to the antiwar statements and sagely nodding and smiling; Yasser Arafat thanking his Hollywood supporters; and Osama bin Laden citing the antiwar demonstrations as supporting the rightness of the Wahhabi cause.

Voiceover: “You may think you did nothing to help terrorism. But your money for a simple movie ticket may go to those who support the killers of innocents, the attackers of America, the enemies of truth. Think again before you go to a movie. Choose freedom.” Then appear pro-freedom statements by Charlton Heston and Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Then the narrator says again, “Choose Freedom.” Fade out.

Some Swedes get it
Finally, some people are realizing the idiocy of recycling? This article from the Telegraph reflects my oft-stated conviction that having a socialist bureaucracy send huge trucks around to every house collecting teeny bits of plastic and glass couldn't possibly be efficient. Shocking! How many Swedish readers of Conundrum are there? Maybe this post is tacked up on bulletin boards all over Uppsala and Malmo. Even the Red East Sussex Council is having second thoughts:
One deputy council leader in the south of England said: "For years recycling has been held up as the best way to deal with waste. It's time that myth was exploded."

A spokesman for East Sussex council, which plans to build an incinerator at Newhaven, said: "It's idealistic to think that everything can be recycled. It's just not possible. Incineration has an important role to play."
Now if they can just start coming around on the concept of the right to bear arms. Dream on, o Conundrumist! Today East Sussex, tomorrow - West Sussex?

Food for thought
The arrest of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad seems a good development in the WoT (love the new acronyms!). Of course, now the numbskulls - even one in Reason - are implying that, now that we've practically wound up AlQaeda, we can stop hassling Iraq. I put it somewhat differently in a comment I left on the Reason

With any luck, the interrogation of Kalihd may produce some information that will make the liberation of Iraq easier and more painless. And maybe without their "mastermind" AlQaeda may start making false steps that may bring in other leaders and even produce proof of ties to Iraq that even the French have to accept. I hope Saddam is having the same thoughts right now.

So there's no connection between Saddam and the war on terror, eh? Combined with the news that Saddam has six missiles fewer, this might be a decent time to go ahead in and give the old totalitarian a lesson with a two-by-four (now where did I get that idea?) Maybe we can keep pushing this disarmament thing until all he's left with is a peashooter and one deaf and dumb eunuch ( that would be Chirac). That would make regime change pleasant.

As to the Turkish parliament's refusal (via Instapundit) to let US troops jump off from bases in Turkey - I think that's a good thing. The fewer allies you have to appease, the better things are likely to turn out. My instinct tells me the Turks will about-face at the last moment in order to get the money on offer, but we should just tell them, "No, thanks, that's OK, we can do very well without you and we need the money for other things, like making sure the Kurds have all the arms and training and logistical support they can possibly use. Just to fight Saddam, of course! You'll understand when we don't invite you to any conferences to settle the borders of the new Kurdish state. Obviously you don't want to get involved. Don't worry, we'll take care of it."
Note on the transliteration of Arabic names into English - I accept no set rule on the transliteration of Arabic names, I just make it up as I go along. I do know something about the sound of the language, at least as it's spoken in Egypt, so my guess is as good as anyone's.

Duesberg in reverse
The CDC, that hotbed of noxious idiocy, is preparing its retreat on the AIDS question. I've taken the hard line that AIDS doesn't exist, that HIV is not injurious and the medications used against AIDS are killing millions. The story is entirely consistent with that point of view. Call me paranoid, but if you had run a twenty-year panic about a disease that didn't exist in order to secure funding for the medical establishment and now the evidence of that disease's non-existence was becoming clearer and clearer, what would you do? Of course! Find a "CURE"! It's pretty easy to find a cure for a disease that doesn't exist. And any people you treat who do die obviously didn't die of the disease but of other "lifestyle factors"! Just run Duesberg in reverse and keep your credibility relatively unimpaired. On to the next flim-flam. The same thing seems to be happening with mad cow disease. It never really did kill anyone. I'll try to find that article I read earlier and link to it. Advantage Duesberg, Mullis - and Conundrum!

I don't believe it
Maybe I'm just becoming a heartless old crank, but I don't believe this article about the "disaster" in Southern Africa caused by famine and AIDS. The population statistics I've seen don't support it. Let's face it, there have always been thousands of orphans in Africa and famine and diseases beyond counting. Until I see statistics from some source other than UN bureaucrats who have to justify their jobs or African dictators who are looking for something else to blame for their countries' poverty than their own evil and incompetence, statistics that show an actual decline in population traceable to AIDS, why would I believe it's true? How can countries like Zimbabwe and Malawi have a sky-high population growth rate and yet be "devastated" by AIDS and famine?
The UN has become a factory of lies. The point of every lie is to extract money for UN bureaucrats and their sponsoring Third World totalitarian thugs like Mugabe and European enablers like Chirac and Schroeder. The concept of proof is as foreign to a UN official as it is to Greenpeace or the Sierra Club. In fact, it's in their interest to discourage the notion of logic as a "Western imperialist construct". Then every demand for proof can be met by presenting a picture of a wide-eyed swollen-bellied moppet. You heartless man! How can you in your corrupt prosperity deny this child its RIGHT to live - at your expense?
But it's the UN-ers who travel in air-conditioned limousines past the dying children to their next gourmet meal, chuckling at the naïveté of the Americans. No more. Not in MY name.

I want some, too
What's Iran doing in this Tehran Times article? Why, they seem to be reminding people of how bad Saddam has been to them over the last twenty years or so:

Ambassador Zarif -- recalling the Iraqi army's use of chemical weapons -- said his government's "conservative" estimate is that 100,000 Iranians were either killed or injured in those attacks.

"Some are continuing to suffer from the effects of chemical weapons on a daily basis," he said. Despite Iranian anger, the ambassador said Iran opposes U.S.-led war against Iraq. "I believe our region cannot take another war. It's a region that has been the subject of two destructive wars, unfortunately, both of which have been launched by Saddam Hussein." He said Iran was concerned "about the humanitarian consequences of another war, about the political consequences of another war, and about the uncertainty that will be pervading."

Why would they be doing that? Could it be that they saw Turkey getting tens of billions of dollars for being on the side of the Great Satan and thought, well, we could spend some of those dollars, too? And then there's this somewhat astonishing statement:

In a meeting between the Iraqi chief spy and a son of Israel's Ariel Sharon, Saddam sent the following message to the Israelis: If Israel convinced the United States not to attack Iraq, as a quid pro quo Iraq will officially apologize to Israel for supporting the Palestinians; Iraq will accommodate two million Palestinians and will grant them Iraqi nationality; and Iraq will supply 350,000 barrels of oil to Israel every day. The Israelis told the Iraq chief spy that they will respond after the elections.

I haven't seen that anywhere else. And some stuff that sounds awfully nutty about American chemical weapons that were taken when Saddam conquered Kuwait and used against the Americans in Desert Storm? Make up your own mind, but something's going on among the mullahs. Mullah-ing things over, I guess.

AIDS in Africa - another theory
Medpundit, (via Colby Cosh and RangelMD), has some details about a just-released study that seems to show that HIV transmission in Africa is not via heterosex, but through dirty needles. So there's more evidence that heterosexual "breakout" of AIDS just doesn't happen. Why not? I'm getting tired of repeating the same evidence from Duesberg and Mullis and virusmyth.com asking over and over how this virus chooses its victims on the basis of their sexual orientation. Isn't there some other "at-risk group" that uses dirty needles - not just poor Africans?
Well, I'm off to take the bar exam, so I won't be blogging for a few days, not that I've done much lately. Hmm, must have something to do with all that studying that right now feels so completely ineffective. Oh, well, I'll just have to go back in July and take it again. Another little vacation.