"You Bet Your Life"

Views From the Southern Front

Hello everyone … My name is Marcos and I'm from Argentina.

Since I'm a lawyer, I became interested in the whole issue of alternative views on HIV/AIDS, when I read a review of Stephen Davis' book Wrongful Death. The topic was so totally new to me that I thought, this guy is nuts!. Nevertheless, I decided to do some research, and day by day I became more interested. I can say now, after almost 4 months of sleepless nights of reading and web searching - and considering I'm not a scientist nor near- that the things I know now make much more sense to me than everything I thought I knew before, after being constantly forced to swallow the message of terror by the mainstream orthodoxy for 25 years.

I'm now 36, I'm single and straight. As far as I can recall, my entire sex life has been conditioned by this terroristic virus that supposedly was everywhere and could catch even the Virgen María!

So, me and my friends got the message and became the greatest contributors to the industry of latex!!! Every colour, taste and shapes of rubbers! I remember once in Peru during vacations some saleswoman selling “musical condoms”!!!.

It is said that the average of “bullets” that a man has in his sex life is more or less 4000. Well my friends, being 36, I must have “used” at least half of them. And guess what? I think that 1900 of my bullets went into a latex bag! What a damn shame  that I´ve been unable to enjoy all of the sexual experience. And how many of us that were terrified of that “one single encounter”. Shame on you Nancy Padian! Why the heck didn't you do your job before I started my sex life?

Years went by,in spite of what we had been told, none of us knew of somebody dying of AIDS. Nevertheless, the news were always the same: the virus that causes aids is spreading throughout the world and threatening to devastate the human race. This message went so deep into our conscience that nobody would even dare to doubt it, in spite of the evidence of their own eyes to the contrary.

I can barely recall the only two things that happened in my country about this. And now, thinking retrospectively, they make a lot of sense to me… Here they go:

(1º) In 1998, One Court in a city called “La Plata” which is the capitol of Buenos Aires province, declared NOT GUILTY a bunch of doctors who were accused of severe misconduct in causing of “HIV infections” and later death of AIDS of many patients during transfusions using untested or badly tasted blood.

The basis for the argument of the defense were the writings of Peter Duesberg and others.

The court  (Judge Horacio Piombo) acquitted the doctors on the base of reasonable doubt, making the following statement: “the actual state of science doesn't demonstrate that HIV is the cause of AIDS”

Of course, this trial didn't have any coverage in the mass media.

(2º) There is one more episode that I can recall from past 1997. A doctor called Ricardo Leschot was invited to a TV show that has a very large audience in my country called “Having Lunch with Mirtha Legrand” (Almorzando con Mirtha Legrand). This man intended to debate with doctor Pedro Cahn (recently named as President of the International Society of Aids). He tried to advocate for Duesberg's points of view for about one minute. Not much he could do when Doctor Pedro Cahn was given 30 minutes to discredit Professor Duesberg and everyone who dares to think different than the orthodoxy and mainstream theory.

Well my friends,  we still have a long way to go on this unmasking road to the truth. Everyone aware of this fraud must do his best to spread the voice. I know it is a hard job, but common sense must prevail and you people in the EEUU should be the most involved. I´m not saying that my governors don´t have responsibility as well in perpetrating this fraud, but it seems to me that in the United States of America - a country that hoists the flag of rule of law, human rights, justice and freedom, etc. etc.-  when it comes to business, those principles become secondary.

See you around, and keep on keeping on!

Marcos el Abogado (aka) "Funes el Memorioso"

The Rockwell-Culshaw Factor !

On Monday, at 1:00 AM EST, Lew Rockwell published a link to Rebecca Culshaw's essay about AIDS and her native Africa.  The response was quite overwhelming as these usage statistics show. Almost 3000 page views and visits in less than 24 hours (graph), and 80% of them direct referrals, as the page, after page, after page (after page) below show  [left clicking on the miniatures enlarges them].

 

Richard Strohman Considers Thermodynamics and Your Health

The essay below is among the more influential of the many that Nature Biotechnology has published over the past quarter of a century. We thank the editors for permission to reprint it. (Otis)

Commentary

Nature Biotechnology 21, 477 - 479 (2003)

Thermodynamics—old laws in medicine and complex disease

Richard Strohman

The search for new laws in biology is associated with the beginnings of molecular biology and with Max Delbruck who brought the idea from physics that living systems, although ultimately reducible to universal physical laws, displayed qualities not shared by nonliving matter, and might harbor new laws unique to life itself. The rich history of twentieth century molecular biology has included a failure to find such laws (refs. 1,2) , and that failure is seen as the major force driving biological research to find so-called genetic laws from which would come understanding of life and of our many diseases, inherited or otherwise. And of course, this failure has prompted the question: "If not in the genome"—and organisms are clearly programmed in some sense of that word—"then where is the program and what is its nature?" Fifty years after the emergence of molecular biology, at the Ciba Conference on The Limits of Reductionism in Biology in 1997 (ref. 2), the philosopher Thomas Nagel reflected on this stubborn absence of understanding in biology. He concluded: "...our finite mental and computational capacities mean that we either cannot grasp the ultimate physical explanation...or we can't fruitfully link the old universal physical laws to higher order phenomena." Therefore, he said, repeating Delbruck, perhaps biologists needed to discover new laws for life. 

The nature of the linkage between physical laws and phenotypes of living matter has now begun to take on new dimensions, although one such key juncture has been known for some time: the laws of thermodynamics and kinetics are linked to the phenotypes of organisms through the agency of dynamical systems. Sadly, this essential point has been all but ignored in the rush to find agent-based genomic-proteomic explanations. Looking back, that substitution of agents for agency must be recognized as an epistemological error of great moment3. Nevertheless, molecular biology has now followed the genotype-to-phenotype trajectory to an end point identified as open, self-organizing, molecular systems within which controls and constraints are distributed among many interacting subsystems, each with robust behavior. The universal metabolic system represented by the 'Chart of Metabolism' known to all biochemists is a prime example of such a system.

What is becoming clearer is that it is just this dynamic metabolic territory where the universal laws of thermodynamics and kinetics join with an organism's phenotype. The levels of organization where this linkage is usefully employed are: first, cell and organ-system physiology; and second, the level of the human organism as a whole, and the population. In the latter case, the linkage is again laws of dynamic physiological systems on the one hand and, on the other, the age-experience-diet-exercise-related trajectories of aging and senescence. Thus, the language of bioenergetics is able to describe the potential and kinetic energy level of a cell, tissue, organ, entire organism and, in a sense, the population as a whole. 

For those scientists accustomed to explanations of disease and health in terms of genes and proteins, this approach might appear nearly incomprehensible. And yet, not only does this view reveal a sophisticated science of dynamical systems, it also suggests several practical approaches to disease prevention and health promotion in populations, and to disease therapy for individuals. This is because almost all of the disease states in question manifest as bioenergetic deficiencies—whether induced by gene or protein variation, by environmental insult, by excess calorie consumption, by insufficient physical activity. These issues were discussed late last year at a conference in Bethesda, MD*, and ranged over dynamical systems theory applied at many levels of biological organization—from molecular biology to populations.

[The complete essay is available as a PDF file here.]

Richard Strohman is emeritus professor of the University of California at Berkeley, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology. He is a former research director of the American Muscular Dystrophy Association.  (Hank)

 

Exodus from the CDC!

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a neat piece on the whiners at the CDC who can't hack it and wanna go home. 

"An exodus of key leaders and scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has raised great concern among five of the six former directors who led the agency over the past 40 years."

Great concern? Hell, this brings great hope! Basically, if you took all the folks who run the United States Postal Service, and sent them to grad school, you'd have the CDC. They are incompetent. They are bad for health, not good for health. The more of 'em quit, the better off we all will be.

"The most visible sign of potential trouble at CDC is the loss of more than a dozen high-profile leaders and scientists since 2004.  By the end of this year, all but two of the directors of CDC's eight primary scientific centers will have left the Atlanta-based federal agency. The wave of departures — which numerous CDC leaders call unprecedented — also includes the agency's top vaccine expert and world experts in several diseases. Just last week CDC's pandemic flu coordinator said he's leaving."

The pandemic flu coordinator is leaving -- Heaven forbid! Just how will we all survive the avian bird flu pandemic that has mercilessly killed 39 of our fine feathered friends in Indonesia, as well as several Nigerian tigers at the zoo:) Will there be a sequel to the made-for-tv movie that engrossed all 500 or 600 folks who watched it?

Memo to head of the CDC, Dr. Julie Geberding: Listen up, Julie. Go make yourself useful and chase down some diseased spinach and leave us be. Or better yet, just quit too, you ditz !

- Barnes

"Physician, First, Do No Harm"

There is another feature item on the RA website that I found when checking the Challenges note (now below), and I am reprinting the second installment for a reason that will be obvious when you read it. There is also a second reason for reprinting it here and now. We (everyone associated with "You Bet Your Life") hope that a slew of emails to Dr. Koehnlein will encourage him to continue his fascinating and frightening tale. (Otis)

   
Claus Koehnlein's Physician's Journal

"Claus Koehnlein, MD, was a specialist in internal medicine in the Dept. of Oncology, Univ. of Kiel, Germany between 1983 -1993. Since 1993, he has been in private practice, increasingly treating HIV- positive people who decline antiviral drugs. Dr. Koehnlein welcomes all correspondence, which may be addressed to him directly at: [email protected]. He may, at his discretion, publish selected letters (anonymously), along with his reply, on this web page.

The AZT Disaster

February 11, 2006

Remember our Patient with the lymphoma? Instead of getting his courses of chemo (COPP-cyclophosphamide, oncovin, procarbacin, prednisone ) he got 1500 mg AZT daily. The COOP is given in cycles of 3 days, repeated every 4-6 weeks to give the bone marrow time to recover. The AZT was given on a daily basis indefinitely. Under both therapy regimes the lymphoma disappears. But under daily AZT the patient follows quickly. We, the orthodox doctors, were not so much concerned about the early passing away of our patient because we were told AIDS patients have a very poor prognosis- so the one under AZT fulfilled the bleak prognosis he was given from the observations that  AIDS patients were passing away without AZT-treatment.

How could this iatrogenic AIDS tragedy have come about? It was because of Fischle et al. in 1987. Their "double-blind, placebo controlled trial", as it was announced in the NEJM, promoted 1500 mg AZT as the wonder drug against AIDS. Their conclusion was that "these data demonstrate that administration of 1500 mg AZT can decrease mortality and frequency of opportunistic infections in a selected group of subjects with AIDS or AIDS-related-complex, at least over the 8 to 24 week of observation."

What does that mean for an orthodox doctor? It means that you are more or less forced to give your patients this recommended treatment. If you don't, the patient can easily sue.

NEJM is the bible for an orthodox doctor. The end of any discussion is - No,  it's true. I read it in the NEJM.

The placebo arm was stopped after four months because by then the advantage of the verum (AZT) seemed so obvious (1 death in a 145 patient verum against 19 deaths of 137 receiving placebo.)

But the question arises whether the advantage of a treatment after four months can be sustained when you give this treatment longer or even lifelong.  AZT was developed to treat cancer and since it is a nucleoside analog it could be possibly useful there. It works like cytosinarabinoside or hydroxyurea, both well known in the treatment of leukemia.  Gallo even proposed AZT in the treatment of "viral leukemia" . But it is not designed to treat people who are already suffering from a loss of T cells.

So how comes it that there was a survival benefit after 4 months of AZT? The patients included were AIDS and AIDS related complex patients. That means they were quite ill, and were suffering from serious opportunistic infections. AZT kills everything that depends on DNA replication -- that means opportunistic infections and also cancers will respond to the treatment -- but at a high price. At the same time you are killing the opportunists with AZT, you are killing all dividing cells quite effectively - that includes those in the bone marrow, the very source of our immune cells.

That's the dilemma: In treating AIDS patients with AZT,  we bring about the very illness we seek to bring under control. And we all knew, orthodox AIDS doctors and borderline rebels both, was that the initial treatment with 1500 mg was an overkill . Everybody admits that now. Yes, it was too much. Maybe some people died,  but that's history, that's the way medicine has always worked. Let's look forward. Today we have this wonderful triple therapy, and mortality rates are dropping. So what, I say.

We virtually killed a whole generation of AIDS patients without even noticing it because the symptoms of the AZT intoxication were almost indistinguishable from AIDS. And the placebo control, which could have warned us, was for "ethical reasons" cut off prematurely.

Indeed, AZT intoxication has given the HIV infection such a lethal outcome that the whole world still believes that HIV is a deadly virus.

I got angry. I wrote a letter to John Maddox, the editor of Nature.

To be continued. "

New on the Dissident Net

An illuminating new feature has recently appeared at the Rethinking AIDS website, Rethinkers Challenge the Dogmatists

"People who question the theory that HIV causes AIDS causes Death often challenge members of the AIDS establishment. They are routinely ignored or casually rebuffed despite the status of their scientific qualifications. This page preserves the discussions so that the unwillingness of the AIDS establishment to engage in debate can be seen by all."

Extremely interesting for what they say, and for what they do not, email exchanges between the following are archived:

"Ron Jones challenges Martin Delaney (Founding Director, Project Inform)
Alex Russell versus Lancet on HIV Isolation
Alex Russell versus Nature on (Non-)Existence of HIV
Etienne de Harven (President of Rethinking AIDS) challenges John Moore
Harrell Graham challenges John Moore
Christine Maggiore and Robin Scovill challenge John Moore
Alex Russell Challenges John Moore and Nicoli Nattrass
John Walker challenges John Moore
Charles Geshekter challenges Nicoli Nattrass"

***

Stephen Davis has some new audio at his podcast site.

One is an interview with him a couple weeks ago on the Progressive Radio Network.

But one of the realest deal, internet audios ever is with Christine Maggiore and Splash Media. It is a recorded interview in Ms. Maggiore's home with Marissa Charles of Splash Media in the UK, which will be publishing the print article next month.

Mr. Davis writes us: "This interview tells Christine’s life story – both before and after her diagnosis as HIV-Positive, in a way that I’ve never heard, and addresses all the errors that appeared in the recent Elle magazine article about the death of her daughter, Elisa Jane.

It’s a long interview (4 parts), but if you never listen to any other podcast I’ve posted, or never read my book or anything else, you must listen to this interview in its entirety – even if you’ve known Christine for years. Besides, it will be interesting to see just how accurate the Splash Media article is when it's printed, compared to this interview."

---
If you have items you wish included in this box, send them to Otis or Hank.  New on the Dissident Net will appear whenever note-worthy items get noted. :)

Sunday Morning with Celia (and Søren): Drinks With a "Monstrous Nothing"

For 20 years, anyone who expressed doubt in the truths of the HIV/AIDS orthodoxy has been blighted. The dynamics of blighting stretch from overt attacks on professional reputations and funding, into the more insidious realms of social marginalization. Like a cancer, the orthodox apparatus finds life and displaces it; It transmutes the admirable into the shameful, and vice versa, so that one can only recognize its value system by accepting the doctrine of its final solution.  Anything that aids the march toward the abolition of doubt is therefore not only accepted but rewarded. This is the ideology of war. Things that are considered decent and right during normal times are abolished and reversed in the charge toward victory.

The apparatus destroys innocence, it demonizes curiosity, it rewards betrayal, it does not recognize friendship or decency, and perhaps worst of all, it operates silently. One can never fight for the thing—be it friendship, professional relationship, common courtesy, fact or feather—that is about to be taken away because it does all its work in stealth. Ordinary people will fall prey almost immediately, and even extraordinary people can only hope they have the steel to weather the inevitable storms.

Last night I was at a party for a literary magazine, and had the chance to speak with a journalist who had profiled me, with a combination of curiosity, disdain, and muddled, grudging admission that something noteworthy was going on, but only via the uncouth quality of tenacity. The journalist told me, not unexpectedly, that she had heard from members of the AIDS orthodoxy. They demanded to know why she had “humanized” me. They wanted to know if she thought I might be approachable, for counter- indoctrination. That would involve me accepting that there is some middle earth where
murder is not wrong, where killing people is necessary, where all of science can be raked into a pit and I could bring myself to applaud the progressiveness. A place where two plus two can equal whatever you want it to, so long as one repeats the mantras of the faithful. When I asked if she might admit to me that not one single one of her friends had perished from a wanton sexual encounter, as per the doctrine, she looked down at her soup and said, meekly, “I just think that…everybody should wear condoms.” If reality is done away with, all we have are vapors--what Kierkegaard called “a monstrous nothing.”
                                        ***
We had been out drinking with an editor he wished to impress. Months earlier. The article in Harper’s had not yet appeared. All they knew was that I had been commissioned. The Editor introduced me to his Science Writer, and said I was writing about Peter Duesberg’s cancer theory, for Harper’s. The science writer said, with a sickly laugh: “I hope he makes more sense about cancer than he does about AIDS.”   I looked at the floor. “He makes a lot of sense about AIDS. Have you read a single one of his papers?”

But the conversation had already moved on. Later, I told the editor that his science writer was very lazy. He lit into me. “You know, you’ve got some nerve. He’s won I don’t know how many journalism awards. How many have you won?”

Tears welled in my eyes and I smiled. “None.”

“Can we go home?” I said in a cracked voice, to my friend. “Please. Can we leave?”

“Calm down Farber,” he said. “Have another drink.”

© 2006 Celia Farber

Celia Farber is widely known "as the world's most dangerous AIDS reporter".  A collection of her finest work, spanning 20 years of investigative reporting, is now available under the title, Serious Adverse Events: An Uncensored History of AIDS. (Hank)

Bialy on Post-Modern Virologists & Politicians

I originally published these passing thoughts at "Hank's" about one month ago, and have since  been informed that this site now invites considerably more readers than it did then. So at the urging of George, I have asked Otis to reprint them:

The difference between today's molecular virologists and politicians.

The former are overly enamored of "single-hit" explanations for even the most complex of phenomena. This is a fault of their teachers and teacher's teachers who were overly influenced by the apparent success of Beadle and Tatum's "one gene, one enzyme" hypothesis.

The latter, on the other hand, are passionate about "multi-hit" strategies and are noted for reducing the simplest of problems to unmanageable proportions at the drop of a coin in the campaign box.

It is another wonder of HIV/AIDS that it majestically and uniquely encompasses both of these divergences.

It may very well be that the meek will inherit the earth. But what will be left to inherit when the last bastard drops dead?

Doc Bialy neither needs nor gets any introduction from us. In fact, we are not even sure which of the beings in the photo, if either, is him. (Hank)

                                                                                                   

Peter Duesberg on "Let's Test Everybody"

Today I received the following email at my website, Duesberg.com, and after having my attention repeatedly called to the new-look and content "Hank's", I told Otis it was fine to publish it and my reply, and that I would try to find the time to write at greater length in the future. (PHD)                                                                    ***                                   

Greetings! I'm a Cal grad in ChE ('84) and am now serving as a campus minister at Rice Univ. I was working at UCSF following graduation, reading all of the gloom and doom coming from there and SF General about HIV/AIDS, and heard about your alternative hypothesis: and it all made for great science and clear thinking.   ... Sorry for the long introduction! So, here's my question:

How will you respond to this latest proposal by the CDC endorsing routine HIV testing? Keep up the great work! - Mike

Dear Mike,

The nation-wide HIV testing lends "national" credibility to the HIV-hypothesis, generates $ for the AIDS companies, and jobs for the CDC and the AIDS establishment.

It's like "Dr. Knock's" (French movie classic) dream - millions are prospective "patients".

                                      ***

Peter Duesberg is a friend and neighbor, and needs even less introduction to the readers of "You Bet Your Life" than Lee Evans. (Hank)

Lee Evans on "Let's Test Everybody"

"I have been all over Africa for almost 30 years and when I first heard there was a new sexually transmitted disease epidemic I was alarmed and began looking for what the television said was everywhere. All I ever saw was more and more of the same diseases we saw in 1975, and it was obvious the increase was because of the worsening living conditions, and the pennies instead of dollars governments were spending on health care. Sure, I have seen TB wards at hospitals and lots of misery, but nobody except the media and the people living off AIDS money ever called that AIDS." Lee Evans (2006)

Once upon a time I was known more for my "activism", than my athleticism. In 1968, it was not an especially good thing. I have been quiet about racism in America for a relatively long time for a lot of reasons. One of them is that I never was somebody who liked to be in the public eye. All the things I have done that people thought were politically motivated were  because of what I learned from my mother and father, and grandmother and the pastor of our church.

But in recent years under the Bush administration, things have gone from bad to worse for all Americans, not only those of African descent. And when it comes to government policy about AIDS, things have now become so bad, I am forced to speak out again.

My latest outrage (that also produced this column) was provoked by the release yesterday of a report recommending near universal testing, and that came with all the expected media hype.

All I can say is that the officials at the CDC who are so impressed with their newest "idea" to keep the non-epidemic alive and well and at the same time promote the racist policies that have been in place in Washington for a long time, should test themselves and their families, and on Oprah Winfrey and Larry King too!

Lee Evans needs no introduction from me, but a new biography, by noted sport's writer Frank Murphy ( The Last Protest: Lee Evans in Mexico City) is worth reading for the true story of that unforgettable olympics. Mr. Evans is currently the head track and field coach at The Univesity of South Alabama in Mobile, and one of his recruits, Vincent Rono (from Kenya) captured the gold in the men's 1500 m. final of the NCAA games held in Sacramento in June. Hank was there. :)