Peace Prize Idiocy. This year's winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Kenyan Wangari Maathai, is an idiot — a well-intentioned idiot but an idiot nonetheless. And to claim that her work advances peace is stretching the word "peace" to uses it doesn't cover. She got people to plant trees, 31 million of them across Africa. That's very nice, but has nothing to do with peace.
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The rationale that deforestation produces a reduction in resources that gives rise to conflict is strained at best. I know of no war that has arisen from deforestation — none.
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The Nobel committee has once again wandered very far from the core concern of the Peace Prize: peace, meaning the reduction of organized violence, international and internal wars. The Nobel Peace Prize is not an environmental prize nor a human rights prize. It is intended to reward the promotion of peaceful interactions among nations, groups, and individuals. It is not a catchall for every socially constructive activity.
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If the Nobel committee wants to promote environmentalism, human rights, or any other cause, it should create new prizes in those categories, but not taint the Peace Prize and weaken its influence in promoting peace by inducing people to work to win it. It should assuredly not be given to someone who actually promotes intergroup resentment and suspicion, as Ms. Maathai has done in asserting very publicly that the so-called "AIDS virus" — which is no such thing* — was produced by white people in a Western laboratory and deliberately, maliciously loosed upon Africa to kill black people!
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Is there a special connection between AIDS and blacks? Yes, alas, there is, because there is a special connection between DRUGS and blacks in Western countries, and profound POVERTY and blacks in Africa. Tony Brown, producer/host of the (former?) long-running black PBS program Tony Brown's Journal, and South African President Thabo Mbeki are among the prominent blacks who have publicly expressed doubts about the HIV-causes-AIDS hypothesis — which hypothesis is NOT fact but only an assertion, an assertion that doesn't make any sense.
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Mbeki has waffled on the issue, sometimes yielding to pressures to conform to the orthodoxy promoted by the U.S. Government, which invented AIDS as a "disease" (rather than drug injury, which it plainly has always been in the West). Apart from drug addicts in Africa developing AIDS (as drug addicts in Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere who have no connection to each other have developed AIDS independently), it is by no means clear that anything unusual is happening in Africa, epidemiologically speaking. Africans today are dying from the same diseases they have always died from, and in fact are living LONGER now than ever before. That may astonish you, but I have followed this for decades, and know that life expectancy has risen over that time. How is that possible if 'the continent of Africa is dying from AIDS', as simpleminded alarmists would have you believe?
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American blacks said to have AIDS also have a long and generally well-known history of drug use or underlying bad health of long duration that did not require nor arise from a mysterious and magical "new" virus. AIDS has never entered the general population of any country where we have really good information (that is, the U.S., Canada, Western Europe), even tho for the first several years, half of the entire planet's AIDS cases were in one country: the United States. Here, in the original home of AIDS, the "disease" has remained tightly confined — for 24 years! — to communities soaked in DRUGS, and the only people who have died from "AIDS" have used drugs, either dangerous recreational drugs or toxic anti-AIDS prescription drugs (which are powerful and toxic enuf alone to produce death in the high dosages they were originally prescribed in) — or both.
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Because AIDS has never entered the general population, and plainly won't EVER do so, an impossibility for a viral disease spread by sex and blood — not "improbability": IMPOSSIBILITY, something that could not possibly happen — it is plain that AIDS is not a viral disease. Res ipse loquitur: the thing speaks for itself. While AIDS has vanished as a serious public-health concern in the United States and other Western countries precisely because it has never entered the general population, it continues to ravage small segments of Western societies, all of them soaked in drugs. In the U.S., it is blacks, Hispanics, and some small segment of gay men (those in the subculture that still, amazingly, regards drugs as "cool"!) who are still developing AIDS and still dying from it. Everyone else is untouched.
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Such a pattern is absolutely impossible for a viral "epidemic" spread by sex and blood. Real diseases strike down the rich and poor without distinction; black and white without distinction; Spanish-speaking and English-speaking without distinction; gay and straight without distinction. But AIDS discriminates. A tiny virus, without eyes to see race, ears to hear language, or brain to form a will to attack some types of people but leave others untouched, is magically able to DISCRIMINATE against minorities! One has to be very credulous and completely clueless as regards science to believe any such thing.
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The new Nobel laureate in "Peace" is one such credulous and clueless fool. If she had genuinely promoted peace instead of environmentalism, we might pass over her incendiary remarks about white people loosing AIDS upon Africa. But since her work in promoting reforestation has only the most tenuous of ties to peace, the Nobel committee should revoke her prize and give it to someone else.
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*For more about the reality (and unreality) of AIDS, see this blog's entries of May 7th and September 16th, 2004.
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:50 PM