Infomercial, RNC, and Rev. Wright

I'm such an easy audience, I'll mist up over a commercial or human interest story on the news. I was inspired by Obama's speech at the Democratic convention, and was moved almost to tears over the stories presented last night. So the 30 minutes were well crafted, designed to pluck the emotional strings and give hope, and succeeded on all levels. Oh, yeah, I used to pour over the books of Studs Terkel and his populist stories, too.

A couple days ago I received a phone call from the RNC asking for a donation. It seems that there was an emergency: that the race in Arizona was tightening up and they needed more money to be competitive. It would be a huge loss of face if John McCain lost. I'll have to start reading some Arizona blogs to see how the newly fortified media blitz is affecting its citizenry.

They could try to send out memos like the Monterey, California Republicans did, likening Barack Obama to a young, if not Black, Adolf Hitler. I think this is in response to the huge, enthusiastic crowds he is drawing, that cheer without being prompted. Let's see, he's been called a socialist, a Communist, a Marxist, a Nazi, a black Adolf Hitler, the Anti-Christ. It seems that all of the negative hit buttons have been triggered and have not worked. If anything, they show how pathetic the old politics has become.

I was waiting for an October surprise, but it looks like all attempts to create one has fizzled out. And the hunt for Osama bin Laden is President Bush's quest; he's contracted since last June with the British Rangers to go into Pakistan instead of our soldiers, and upped the amount of drones flying into that country and dropping bombs on al Qaeda operatives. That is the most elusive man on the planet. It might be better to contract with the Kurds, whom, it is rumored, actually found Saddam Hussein and kept him in that hole in the ground for several days until letting the US forces "discover" him.

Oh, wait, there's still Rev. Wright. The man who was taped saying things that many in the black community have wondered about for years, that whites may find repugnant but are innocuous to people of color. One of the things he said may be correct, that the AIDS virus was genetically engineered in the United States. In an article in the well titled Paranoia Magazine, Alan Cantwell, MD, states that it was created by Dr. Alfred M. Prince at the New York Blood Center for a hepatitis B experiment: "The earliest AIDS cases in America can be clearly traced back to the time period when the hepatitis B experiment began at the New York Blood Center. The Center began injecting gay men with multiple doses of the experimental vaccine in November 1978. The inoculations ended in October 1979, less than two years before the official start of the epidemic. Most importantly, the vaccine was developed in chimpanzees - the primate now thought to contain the "ancestor" virus of HIV. Also downplayed is the Center's pre-AIDS connection to primate research in Africa and also to a primate center in the New York City area. The final experimental vaccine was also made by Merck and the NIH from the pooled serum specimens of countless gay men who carried the hepatitis B virus in their blood.

The New York Blood Center (NYBC) is the largest independent blood supplier and distributor in the USA. In 1970, Alfred M Prince, M.D., head of the NYBC Laboratory of Virology, began his hepatitis research with chimps housed at LEMSIP (the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery) in downstate Tuxedo, NY. Until disbanded in 1997, LEMSIP supplied New York area scientists with primates and primate parts for transplantation and virus research.

Founded in 1965, LEMSIP was affiliated with New York University Medical Center, where the first cases of AIDS-associated Kaposi's sarcoma were discovered in 1979. NYU Medical Center researchers were also heavily involved in the development of the experimental hepatitis B vaccine, and the Center received government grants and contracts connected with biological warfare research beginning in 1969, according to Dr. Leonard Horowitz, author of Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola [1996].

In 1974 Prince, with the support of Aaron Kellner, President of the NYBC, moved the chimp hepatitis research to a new primate center called Vilab II in Robertsfield, Liberia, in Africa. Chimps were captured from various parts of West Africa and brought to VILAB. The lab also prides itself by releasing "rehabilitated" chimps back into the wild. One cannot help but wonder if some of the purported "ancestors" of HIV in the African bush have their origin in chimpanzees held in African primate labs for vaccine and medical experimentation.

The hepatitis B experiment, which inoculated over 1,000 healthy gay men, was a huge success with 96% of the men developing antibodies again the hepatitis virus. This high rate of success could not have been achieved if the men were immunosuppressed, because immunosuppressed people do not easily form antibodies to the vaccine. The experiment was followed by similar hepatitis B experiments using gay men in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Denver and St. Louis, beginning in March 1980 and ending in October 1981, the same year the epidemic became official.

In the mid-1980s the many blood specimens donated by the gay Manhattan men during the experiment were retrospectively examined for HIV infection by researchers at the NYBC. It was determined that 6% of the specimens donated between 1978-1979 were positive for HIV. By 1984 (the end of the study period) over 40% of the men tested positive for HIV."

Perhaps we might also find out the true story behind sending government made anthrax through the mail...