Inside the Asylum

Speaking of the AIDS issue in Africa, this story caught my eye. Apparently in Kenya, a majority of patients prefer to have an injection even in cases where a pill would be just as good.

Even where oral medicine is prescribed, a survey shows that 60 per cent of Kenyans seeking treatment demand an injection instead of tablets... Dr Muraguri blamed Kenyans for their preference for injections over drugs due to misconceptions that they work better... In Kenya, about five per cent of new HIV and Hepatitis infections are a result of unsafe use of injections during treatment or drawing blood.

Ahmadinejad summarizes his achievements over the last four years.

"During this four years, great dignity has been established in both outside and inside Iran," Ahamdinejad said at the beginning of the debate broadcasted live by the state-run television. "The Iranian nation has made itself an adorable image in the international community," he said.

Don't you just adore him?

While Japan was in the process of losing >50,000 people, Australia added an extra 152,700 people to the population comparing births to deaths. They also gained another 253,400 through migration.

It's sure to seriously annoy Russia if NATO expands to the shores of the Caspian Sea. Of course, plans for a pipeline from the Caspian have nothing to do with it ...

A senior source within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Joint Force Command has told EurasiaNet that Azerbaijan stands a better chance of gaining NATO membership in the near future than either Georgia or Ukraine... A NATO diplomatic source, who did not want to be named, said some key officials at NATO headquarters in Brussels were pushing hard for engaging Azerbaijan on the membership question. "Turkey, Romania, Italy, Poland, [the] UK and [the] Baltic states," are among the member-states also backing a fast track for Azerbaijan’s NATO membership, the diplomatic source said.

But the story also adds

Unlike Georgia and Ukraine, Azerbaijan, long careful about balancing its ties with both the West and Russia, has never openly expressed an aspiration to join NATO

What does it all mean? Can we trust this story? I don't know ... but it seems like something to watch in future.

The Pope wins a round. Edward C. Green is director of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies...

“The pope is correct,” Green told National Review Online... “There is,” Green adds, “a consistent association shown by our best studies, including the U.S.-funded ‘Demographic Health Surveys,’ between greater availability and use of condoms and higher (not lower) HIV-infection rates. This may be due in part to a phenomenon known as risk compensation, meaning that when one uses a risk-reduction ‘technology’ such as condoms, one often loses the benefit (reduction in risk) by ‘compensating’ or taking greater chances than one would take without the risk-reduction technology.”

Some back-story, or ways in which the MSM reported the Pope's position:
The Guardian:

Pope claims condoms could make African Aids crisis worse. Pontiff's remarks on first visit to continent outrage health agencies trying to halt spread of HIV and Aids

New York Times:

Rebecca Hodes of the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa said that if the pope were serious about preventing H.I.V. infections, then he would focus on promoting wide access to condoms and spreading information on how best to use them. “Instead, his opposition to condoms conveys that religious dogma is more important to him than the lives of Africans,” said Ms. Hodes, the campaign’s director of policy, communication and research.

MSNBC:

"Talking about the nonuse of condoms is out of place. We need condoms to protect ourselves against diseases and AIDS," teacher Narcisse Takou said Tuesday in Yaounde.

Next thing you know the Pope will be insisting that he thinks Christianity is the best religion. Well, is the Pope catholic? Oh dang, I forgot ...

The Rhetorician practices his rhetoric:

The LAT discovers the Happy Unemployed: For the funemployed, unemployment is welcome. Funny how stories like this one never surface during Republican administrations, when the slightest macroeconomic hiccup is often painted by liberals and their MSM allies as a tragic recession. What’s next? Funflation? Everything is more expensive, so it’s like adding value to your life!

Pretty effectively too, if I may say so.

Snake (I heard you were dead) has more on how little Arab powers really care about Palestinians, except as a useful geo-political weapon.
[See also my previous post on the subject]

How does this compare with Obama's attempts at Stimulus?

China allocates more than 60% of central budget to public works as of May.

I'm not going to comment in detail on Obama's Egyptian speech for the simple reason that I'm sure a million interesting blogs are already doing it. I do, however, want to highlight one particular section. He was trying to reach out to the "Muslim World" (whatever that is), but one comment (unintentionally) said "you are wrong" to billions of non-Muslims.

"And I believe that America holds within her the truth that regardless of race, religion, or station in life, all of us share common aspirations - to live in peace and security; to get an education and to work with dignity; to love our families, our communities, and our God. These things we share. This is the hope of all humanity," he said.

So let's get this straight: it is a "truth" that all people share an aspiration to love "our God." That's fine for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Let's take a look at a list of followers of world religions with at least 100 million followers (no guarantee of accuracy of numbers!). I've put in bold all the people Obama has excluded from his "truth" that is supposed to cover "all people regardless of religion."

1 Christianity: 2.1 billion
2 Islam: 1.5 billion
3 Secular/Nonreligious/Agnostic/Atheist: 1.1 billion
4 Hinduism: 900 million
5 Chinese traditional religion: 394 million
6 Buddhism: 376 million
7 primal-indigenous: 300 million
8 African Traditional & Diasporic: 100 million

President Obama, you just raised your middle finger and said "f**k you!" to over 3 billion people who do NOT hold those things to be common aspirations on the basis of religion alone. How many people who voted for you have you just insulted? I've no idea, but I'm sure it's in the millions. If you want to reach out to Muslims that's fine ... but don't insult half the world in the process, including millions of citizens of your own country. This is worse than that thing about clinging to their guns and religion.

Let's not even go into the fact that there are plenty of people who have no desire to live in peace, nor do they want to get an education (in the case of the Middle East alone, there might be a few more books translated into Arabic if there were more), who do not love their families (what's the divorce rate in USA?), their communities (how much vandalism and litter in your community?). These things are not the hopes of all humanity.

Obama has gotten away with saying one thing and doing another for so long, I'm not sure he knows any other way.

However, Muslims will judge him by his actions and not his words, said Mohammad Wasel, 20, from Cairo. "There will be a lot of talk, but I seriously want to see something real coming out of this speech, something tangible," Wasel said. His views were shared by an Eritrean social worker in Rome, a retired teacher in Baghdad and a Palestinian mayor in the Occupied West Bank. "[Obama] has to walk the talk," said social activist Marina Mahathir, daughter of Malaysia's former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad.

If this is any indication, it looks like the Arab "man in the street" is more sensible than about 52% of American voters ...

170 years is a long time ago ... for an American, or an Australian, New Zealander, whatever ... and I commented on the difference in perspective in the Middle East in a previous post. Today's example comes from China.

Beijing police Wednesday set fire to 393.5 kg of illegal drugs to mark the 170th anniversary of the famous Humen Opium Destruction... A new memorial hall dedicated to Lin Zexu was also opened to the public in Fuzhou Wednesday.

This requires a short history lesson: the British, Americans, and other powers had been importing opium to China in large quantities for the main reason that they had a massive trade imbalance with the Chinese and couldn't find any other product the Chinese would buy in sufficient volume. There was a major debate in Beijing about the drug issue. (Should we legalise and regulate it, or ban it altogether? Sound familiar?) The final decision was to have a war on drugs, and they appointed Lin Zexu as special minister plenipotentiary, and sent him off to the south to root out the problem. He confiscated a while pile of opium from the foreigners, and destroyed it all ... and here were are 170 years later seeing the Chinese recreate the scene with real drugs.

It's rather fascinating that they've left out a very crucial part of the story from this particular Xinhua article commemorating the event. The confiscation of the opium from the British merchants led within a short time to the dispatch of a British military expedition to China and what we now call the 1st Opium War. The article doesn't make any mention of this, and just as curious, it doesn't even try to label drugs as a foreign problem that's been imported into China. Considering that it's a common catch-all to blame foreign pollution for every social ill (prostitution, pornography, you name it ...) it's actually quite something to see a Chinese story conspicuously fail to mention it.

This article is interesting, especially since it is making essentially the same point as the earlier Turkish editorial I posted about recently.

Obama is the first major Western leader, after Bonaparte, to address Islam as a single bloc, thus adopting the traditional Islamic narrative of dividing the world according to religious beliefs. This ignores the rich and conflict-ridden diversity of the 57 Muslim-majority nations and fosters the illusion, peddled by people such as Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, that Islam is one and indivisible and should, one day, unite under a caliphate.

A friend of mine occasionally sends me emails he gets from Stratfor. Today's had this interesting piece:

However, politics have proved obstructive to all facets of counterterrorism policy. And politics may have been at play in the Muhammad case as well as in other cases involving Black Muslim converts. Several weeks ago, STRATFOR heard from sources that the FBI and other law enforcement organizations had been ordered to “back off” of counterterrorism investigations into the activities of Black Muslim converts. At this point, it is unclear to us if that guidance was given by the White House or the Department of Justice, or if it was promulgated by the agencies themselves, anticipating the wishes of President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder.

As Instapundit likes to say: the country's in the very best of hands.

No, this post isn't another story about resettlement of Koreans living in Japan. Kyodo News reports that despite the fact that Japan's birthrate rose slightly in 2008, and has been rising ever since the record low in 2005, they lost 1.14 million people to even the less serious forms of death. (Oddly, this is the most they've lost since 1947. What happened in 1947? After-effects of the war?) As a result Japan's population declined by 51,371 people last year.

Chinese government news organ Xinhua announces today that there is a "demonstration" in Tiananmen Square. There is also an unusual military presence in the square. (Why does my damn spell checker not know how to spell Tiananmen? It keeps suggesting Tienanmen = wrong!) President Hu has even met with the demonstrators, one of whom said, "I've felt the glory and the greater responsibility."
Yes, that's right.

A group of 157 former service men visited the solemn Tian'anmen Rostrum, on north of the Tian'anmen Square in central Beijing, Wednesday, for a demonstration honoring for their exemplary service since leaving the Army.

And you thought Beijing wouldn't acknowledge the importance of Tiananmen Square in early June...