The Lazarus Effect?

Vanity Fair is doing its best to help us feel better about whatever it is we’re doing in and to Africa. They’ve painted a rainbow coalition of the bright and brainless to sell us the future vision for a new and improved Africa.

The issue is edited by everybody’s favorite sex-and-death rock and roller, Paul Hewson – that is, Bono – who remembers enough from catechism to know that sex must equal death (at least for poor people – it’s an Irish Catholic thing, you know).

If I’m being cryptic, or bitter, please excuse me.

But do have a look at the article on the miracles of Nevirapine, and tell me what it is that we’re going to do, in actual reality, with these poor folks…

If I am to believe the marketing, I must accept that all the poor and starving in Africa are actually living about as long as Europeans did in the Middle Ages, because they have normative, reproductive sex once in a while.

Where Does 60 Billion Dollars Go?

The Group of Eight rich-and-powerful nations have decided to send $60 billion to “fight Aids, TB and Malaria” in Africa.

That will certainly include some anti-TB and -Malaria drugs, but…what about providing sewage reclamation for Soweto, Kampala, and other large cities? Last time I looked, the Uganda Sewerage Corporation provided about 7% of the Kampala region with sewage reclamation. (The rest just go where they live).

Try that in the New York City area in summer, and tell me how it would go…

How about pesticides – DDT – to kill mosquitoes? Well, we did it here for quite some time, (and provided sewage reclamation for everyone) – and lookee, no more malaria.

How much of that money is going to clean water programs? How about infrastructure development?

As far as the “Aids” money – what’s that for but putting rubbers on everyone and keeping the population in check – plus making taxpayers pay for the poisons we call ‘Aids drugs’?

If we’re interested in population control – ie Eugenics – why don’t we just say so? I guess the good, American, “liberal” population might not find that so easy to support.

So, where does the money go, mes amis?