Read it.

AIDS forgotten? Sure, like Sarah Palin is forgotten.

Koop’s 1988 “Understanding AIDS” report, mailed to every household in the nation, was aimed at democratizing a disease with specific  risk groups caused by extremely specific risk factors. A heterosexual couple appears in the first picture, with the first captioned image that of what  appears to be a lesbian saying AIDS is also a woman’s disease. Lesbian-to-lesbian sexual contact as a risk factor? “To date there are no confirmed cases,” declared a 2008 CDC report 18 years later.

Today American black males have 30 times the HIV infection rate of white females.

Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s are the nation’s sixth and 14th-leading causes of death of death respectively, yet HIV/AIDS gets 34 times and 25 times more per fatality respectively.

And no, it’s not homophobic to point out that AIDS is essentially 100% preventable while none of these other diseases is preventable at all.

Heterosexual men have a greater chance of getting breast cancer than AIDS. So I care about AIDS the same way I care about skate-board-induced quadriplegia: Dude, it’s your Own Damed Fault.

And guess who it’s being hinted should pay for prescriptions for the nation’s entire population that engages in high-risk activities? Yes, give and give generously. Uncle Sam insists.

Why such grotesquely favorable treatment for AIDS? Partly it’s simple inertia. But much is because a huge AIDS bureaucracy now exists, with vast numbers of organizations and their employees voraciously feeding at various international, national, state and privately funded troughs.

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The Hague Conventions of 1907 (Article 31) declared that if you happened to be able to catch a spy alive, you were supposed to give them a trial before executing them; however, nothing contained therein indicated that the trial had to be anything more than a field military tribunal. This tribunal could be limited to the issue of whether the person you caught was, in fact, guilty of the espionage in question. Of course, if you have to kill the spy to prevent ongoing espionage, well, them’s the breaks.

And there’s your jihadis and your Somali pirates. Dead men walking.

A “spy” is defined under the same conventions as one who “acting clandestinely or on false pretences, [] obtains or endeavours to obtain information in the zone of operations of a belligerent, with the intention of communicating it to the hostile party.” This, of course, is a textbook explanation of what Assange has done, during the course of paying Manning (and perhaps others) to illegally and clandestinely obtain information on America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and communicate them to any and all hostile parties with access to the Internet. And from all indication (based on his own words and promises) he intends to continue doing it for as long as he can escape prosecution for being a rapist. Therefore, if we can catch him alive, then I suppose he must be given a field tribunal of some sort – it’s not all bad, though, because that will give us the opportunity to kill him in a way less painless than a small-caliber round to the back of the head. Of course, I’d certainly never suggest torturing him to death – perish the thought. If the bastard runs, forcing us to kill him, well, they shoot horses, don’t they?

That sums up my position on the subject pretty well.

As a side note, I have been informed that some exceptionally ignorant people are referring to Pfc. Bradley Manning as a “whistleblower.” Folks, if Bradley Manning is a whistleblower, so was Aldrich Ames. The word “spy” has a meaning, it is applicable to an identifiable class of people (including both Ames and Manning) and it is an insult to “whistleblowers” to associate them with this filth. The willingness of some to use “whistleblower” as applied to Manning is just further evidence that to some people, anyone who harms America’s military can’t possibly be anything other than a hero.

Read it.

Be the first on your block….

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No one other than Barack Obama and the Kremlin care about START.

But we should. We should also care that the Senate GOP, thanks to the “skillful” negotiations of Jon Kyl (R-AZ), have decided to sell us down the river to Moscow in order to temporarily avoid the Obama tax increase.

The sad part is that we could get the Bush tax cuts extended even without selling out our national security.

Actually, one could just set up a template ‘Senate GOP Sells out X for Y’ and run with it pretty much every day, substituting appropriate values for X and Y.

The problem with compromising with ‘progressives’ is as follows:

What they get: They get to do A.

What we get: They don’t get to do B, C, D, E, and F.

Thus each ‘compromise’ leaves us worse off and them farther toward their objective, until they win and we lose.

Let’s not even go there.

Read it.

Read it.

EVERYTHING YOU’D WANT TO KNOW ABOUT VIKINGS is IN THAT BOOK.

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Rep.-elect Tim Scott (R., S.C.) said Wednesday that he’s not going to join the Congressional Black Caucus.

“While I recognize the efforts of the CBC and appreciate their invitation for me to caucus with them, I will not be joining at this time,” Mr. Scott said in a statement. “My campaign was never about race.”

Thereby cementing the CBC’s position as an explicitly Democrat organization. (We already knew that it was an explicitly racist organization.)

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Yet the animal that may well be New Zealand’s most bizarrely instructive species at first glance looks surprisingly humdrum: the tuatara. A reptile about 16 inches long with bumpy, khaki-colored skin and a lizardly profile, the tuatara could easily be mistaken for an iguana. Appearances in this case are wildly deceptive. The tuatara — whose name comes from the Maori language and means “peaks on the back” — is not an iguana, is not a lizard, is not like any other reptile alive today.

In fact, as a series of recent studies suggest, it is not like any other vertebrate alive today. The tuatara, scientists have learned, is in some ways a so-called living fossil, its basic skeletal layout and skull shape almost identical to that of tuatara fossils dating back hundreds of millions of years, to before the rise of the dinosaurs. Certain tuatara organs and traits also display the hallmarks of being, if not quite primitive, at least closer to evolutionary baseline than comparable structures in other animals.

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Well, that’s a relief.

The ones who do hate the rich, the article explains, are journalists and professors jealous that their college and private school classmates are making so much more money than they are.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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Keisha Buchanan, the former Sugababes singer, says the success of the middle-class Kate Middleton with Prince William has given her hope with Prince Harry.

Yeah, good luck with that.

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And, of course, these are THE RICH who need to be taxed more.

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Bloomberg reports:

Citigroup Inc., recovering from its $45 billion bailout in 2008, is in advanced talks to hire former White House Budget Director Peter Orszag, people with knowledge of the matter said.

Orszag, 41, may take a job in the New York-based firm’s investment-banking division, the people said, declining to be identified because the discussions are private. An announcement may come as early as today, one of the people said.

Notice that he’s going to take “a job.” It doesn’t tell us what kind of job because it doesn’t really have to. The important thing is that he’s on the payroll. What skills does he bring to the table? He’s a smart guy but one thing he brings is his ability to call people in the White House and the Fed and have them return his call.

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And yet: Which of us has not been tempted to do the same?

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By now it is evident to all but the most brassbound liberals, incorrigible in their refusal to face hard facts, that Islam contains within it a sizeable faction of determined men whose politics derive from the warmaking doctrines of the Jihad. Wherever Islam is, this faction will be also. Virtually every time a Jihadist is arrested (as one recently was in Portland) for conspiring to bring fire and slaughter to unarmed American civilians, we are treated to a mass of all-too-familiar reporting to the effect that almost no one suspected that this quiet kid who kept to himself could possibly turn to Jihad. Indeed, in several recent cases it appears that the division between the Jihadist and the elusive moderate Muslim drives all the way down to the household level. So wherever Islam is, the Jihad will be.

Perhaps nothing demonstrates the folly of liberalism on this matter more clearly than that its adherents persist in laying hold of the old idiom of racism in abusing their interlocutors, when it is evident to anyone with a modicum of curiosity that this is chiefly a doctrinal and cultural, not a racial matter. Speaking from personal experience, it’s now been almost five years since I spent a portion of an evening at an event at the University of Georgia arguing (quite civilly) about the Jihad with a Muslim of Swedish extraction and American heritage.

Read it.

We’ve been hearing about the science of Star Trek for years, but what about the engineering of Star Trek? Star Trek’s writers may pay precious little attention to scientific accuracy, but sadly, they pay even less attention to engineering. Science and engineering are two different, albeit related concepts, and Star Trek has successfully butchered them both, while claiming to champion them.

Every Federation starship has a chief engineer, right? And the chief engineer’s job is to keep everything running and solve problems, right? Right, but unfortunately, that’s about the only thing they get right.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

If I had a dollar for every time the Enterprise nearly blew up, I’d be a rich man.

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A fascinating list, and some pretty recent stuff; which makes me wonder what else is out there waiting to turn up.

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‘Stand back, everyone. I take very large steps.’

My question is: How come they all dress like girls?

Megan McArdle enjoys the irony.

Perhaps you have to be familiar with New York politics to understand how truly bizarre this story is: 1199 is dropping its health care coverage for children.  1199 is the extraordinarily powerful local health care workers’ union which has pushed New York State’s Medicaid reimbursements into the stratosphere.  The state not only has much higher than average Medicaid enrollment, but also spends more per-enrollee than any state but Alaska.  Every time a governor tries to cut into, say, the funds for home health care workers, the union runs tear jerking ads which imply that the governor is trying to end health care for everyone in the state.

Read it. And watch the video.

Gates of Vienna is one of the websites I read every day.