Science Guardian

And why it means we must salute Thabo Mbeki

A somewhat worrying testament to the level of intelligence and alertness of the mass television audience came this morning on Sunday in New York, which ran from 7 am to 9 am on NBC in New York.

The producers apparently were unable to find, in whatever meeting they had to determine the contents of this broadcast, which presumably reaches a healthy slice of the population who are willing to emerge by 8.45 am Eastern Time on Sunday morning, any topic more relevant than that presented by a willing young woman from some housekeeping magazine.

Apparently the editors of that magazine had sat around as is their wont and brainstormed a new use for kitchen equipment -in this case, tea towels. Ranged along the studio counter were the inspirations they had come up with:

1). Take the tea towel, cover a piece of rectangular plywood with it, cut the surplus edges off, glue it to the wood, mount a couple off saucepan hooks to it, and mount on your kitchen wall for decorative effect.

2) Take a tea towel, cut a piece from it and fold in two, then seam it on two sides to make a colorful decorative bag in which to gift wrap a bottle of wine (tie with ribbon after inserting bottle).

3) Take a tea towel, just wrap the bottle without bothering to make seams, and tie with ribbon to achieve the same effect.

4) Some other “new idea” which escapes our memory as we were already resisting the mindbending triviality and sheer uselessness of these suggestions as to how we all might spend our next spare hour.

On the other hand, it is perhaps pleasant to be reminded that there are large swathes of the Sunday morning audience in the business capital of the world who are not lying in bed like sluggards contemplating the great issues which bedevil human existence but are willing to get up and pay attention to four new ways to use kitchen towels for decorative purposes.

This suggests that at least some people have produced order out of chaos in their own private existence to such an extent, ie have everything is in its place to such a high level of control and organization, that they have no better thing to do on Sunday morning at 8.45 am than be instructed how to make original uses of their spare tea towels, or even go out and buy new ones for these projects.

On the other hand we have to be concerned that this involves a narrowing of their focus of attention and a neglect of the great issues of the world that leaves them totally vulnerable to whatever nonsense irresponsible people may be peddling in realms such as health, since they must be reading very little on or off the Web and television is no source for questioning received wisdom, with the signal exception of John Stossel of ABC News.

This is why we feel that thought leaders such as Tony Fauci, Jeffrey Sachs, Bill Clinton, Nicholas Wade, Nicholas Kristof, Chris Mooney, Ronald Bailey, Andrew Sullivan and the editors of the New York Times are abdicating a very important responsibility when they fail to assess or reassess conventional wisdom in HIV?AIDS and act as propaganda broadcasters for a paradigm which has been effectively rejected by the most tested scientific literature on the topic.

We were reminded yesterday that Tony Fauci, for example, was asked at one point by his sister Denise more than ten times if he didn’t think that Peter Duesberg of Berkeley had a point in reviewing and rejecting the HIV=AIDS claim in top journals in refereed articles. This is by Tony’s own account in the AAAS newsletter (referred to in our earlier post on Fauci the other day, Christmas gift to Jonathan must concern NIAID’s Tony Fauci, see AAAS Observer of September 1 1989, the newsletter of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, whose journal is Science, a note entitled “Writing for my sister Denise”.). His answer was to “laugh” at the idea.

His sister evidently does or did a lot more thoughtful reading that Tony and we would have thought he would take her advice and delve into the matter and even rethink his position, but apparently not. Apparently Tony felt even at that early stage in the great repressed debate on AIDS and its real cause that it wasn’t worth the effort, politically speaking.

Today, it is clear that no one in the higher echelons of the established media-health-complex thinks it worthwhile either, and won’t until some great editor of a major periodical takes matters into his or her hands and publishes an expose of the mass of wriggling political worms under the AIDS stone with sufficient chapter and verse that politicians and the running dogs of the other media cannot ignore it.

The point is that this is a democracy where a very large portion of voters are preoccupied with more immediate matters such as cutting up tea towels, and they trust and rely on their leaders in health as in any other realm not to mislead them, and that depends on such leaders using their brains and reading challenges to conventional wisdom, or at least getting their staff on the job, and not reserving their original thought processes exclusively for their lifetime projects of self advancement.

How many such people are there, in fact? In AIDS, only one person in the world seems to have taken this level of personal responsibility for promulgating a policy in HIV?AIDS based on accurate science, and that is Thabo Mbeki of South Africa.

Thabo Mbeki’s distinguished brain

A black revolutionary and intellectual, he was a prime mover in freeing South Africa from the chains of apartheid, and now he is the only leader so far on the world stage that will be able to take credit for the breaking of the chains of illegitimate scientific authority in HIV?AIDS, ie for the review and (according to the scientific literature) predictable downfall of the mass scientific and medical self-delusion in HIV?AIDS, when sooner or later this inevitably occurs.

We look forward to that day not only because it will scotch a paradigm which (according to the repeated reviews in the best refereed literature) is costing untold dollars, lives and misery without reason or evidentiary justification, but because it will strike a blow for the status of Africa and Africans in the world which will finally blow apart the remaining colonial mindset that allows ignorant reporters and editors in the US press to view the continent and its people as wholly benighted and superstitious woolly heads straight out of the pages of Black Mischief.

It really is about time that the New York Times stopped running little else about Africa other than famine, genocide, disease, supposed pandemic and, most sensationally of late, gross aberrations of sexual culture that its pith helmeted reporters unearth in dark corners of a continent which is in important ways the first cradle of human civilization, and which was a lot more stable and prosperous before it was disrupted by colonial takeover, exploitation and abandonment by the West.

Now we have the new colonial exploitation of African AIDS, and when Mbeki perceives this accurately as such (in line with the scientific literature which so many in the West ignore) he is demeaned in the New York Times and other media in the US as racist by editors and reporters are apparently less scientifically literate than Mbeki himself, who was trained as an economist.

It is about time that American media developed the same respect for Africa and Africans as they have for America and the Americans.

In this regard we like a relevant quote we came across recently by the neuroscientist and brain researcher Michael Gazzaniga of Dartmouth, who told an interviewer at The Planetary Society:

There isn’t ten cents worth of difference between the Kalahari bushman and the Oxford don. The cultural patina is different to be sure but the basic drives and mental capacities are more similar than different.

.

We have been studying what Gazzaniga and other neuroscientists have to say about the human brain and its often rather defective operation, analytically speaking, and have discovered that with each passing year brain research explains more and more about the abysmal record of the scientific community in regard to the HIV?AIDS paradigm, and we will post about that very soon, once we have finished our morning operation of cutting up tea towels and other personal priorities.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 22nd, 2006 at 11:03 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.