Oh, the sweet joy of being right!

If you live long enough, and if you are as intelligent, wise and knowledgeable as me - stop giggling, 'Teabag'! - you will eventually find yourself proved right and a bunch of con-artists and mugs proved wrong. Was it the 1980s or the 1970s that AIDs first appeared?  I can't remember exactly but it was certainly a hell of a long time ago.  Do you remember the scare stories, the 'Great & the Good' telling us all never on any account to dip our wicks without at least two condoms and a woolly sock for protection? And do you remember how they howled their outrage at the merest hint that it was only druggies,  poofters and prostitutes who were at real risk, despite the excellent Michael Fumento writing a book at the time which comprehensively showed that, apart from the constant needle use of drug addicts, it was  abrasions to the anal passage, and to vaginal linings, of mostly prostitutes, which were subject to wear and tear, that were the means by which the infection was passed? And do you remember the zillions and trillions of dosh that disappeared down the greedy gullets of UN so-called scientists who kept forecasting the end of the world? And were you one of the mugs who contributed to their enrichment?  And do you ever dwell on the thought of, say, how many African villages and South American shanty towns could have been provided with fresh water for the same money and thus saved the lives of too many children to count - and still have change left over?  Well, if you did, and you didn't, then you should!

Today, it was announced that the UN, at last, has had to revise its estimates of AIDs drastically downwards. For example, in India they reckoned there were 6m sufferers, that has now been halved - and my guess is they could halve it again and they would still be over!  Apparently, only a year ago some conman, oops, sorry, some cove called M. Peter Piot, a Belgian scientist(!) and boss of the UN AIDs agency since its inception in 1995, warned that the AIDs "pandemic and its toll are outstripping the worst predictions". Can we look forward to M. Piot's resignation on the grounds of either gross mendacity or gross incompetence?  Don't hold your breath!

One prize prune pulled this plum from the pudding that constitutes his brain: "Daniel Halperin, an AIDs expert(!) at the Harvard School of Public Health, said Governments face a dilemma. "On the one hand, it would be a mistake to radically decrease funding for HIV. But on the other hand, why not put more money into family planning or climate change?"  That's the sort of decisive, clear thinking one would expect from Harvard/Yale/Oxbridge, take your pick! Climate change, so dear to the hearts and wallets of yet another bunch of alarmists with an eye on relieving you of your hard-earned money whilst promising to save you from Armageddon. Their great-grandfathers sold snake oil!

A quick prayer to the Intelligent Designer, or Incompetent DIY-Man: Please, please, please, let me live long enough to see the HAFs (Hot Air Fanatics) similarly shown up.

Comments

[merkur]

And do you ever dwell on the thought of, say, how many African villages and South American shanty towns could have been provided with fresh water for the same money and thus saved the lives of too many children to count - and still have change left over?

Presumably the children could use the change to hire babysitters, since their parents would have all died from AIDS.

[David Duff]

No, Merkur, because, if you haven't picked up the news, the AIDs scare was just that - a scare. Yes, of course, many people had it (and still do) but not anywhere near the 'zillions' that the 'experts' told us to expect. And most of the African governments simply counted everyone who was suffering with a head cold or athlete's foot or worse and called it AIDs after multiplying the total by their President's birthday in order to come up with a sufficiently huge number to keep Western 'experts' happy - after all, those Western experts depended on really big numbers to keep their gravy train running - see "M. Peter Piot, a Belgian scientist(!) and boss of the UN AIDs agency", passim.

Now, there-in lies a lesson for you, Merkur. The next time some prat like Al Gore tells you that the end of the world is nigh, start counting your spoons!