Palin and McCain: advocating a new AIDS epidemic

It's all about the consequences to our actions. It's about the fallout from what we do, what we think ... what we force others to do; consequences that could be turning human lives into wreckage 50 years after we've been consigned to holes in the ground.

The United States, at this moment, stands at a crossroads. Voters can do a 180 and head back to safer roads. They can turn one way and forge ahead into an iffy future where there are no guarantees, but where intelligent, reasonable, compassionate and forward-thinking people work side by side to build a future we can actually live in. Or they can turn the other way, and cruise into the dystopian future which has been featured in several novels which, frankly, people like you and me find so bizarre and depressing, we can't even finish them.

Imagine an America where most people actually believe the very letter of the Bible .. the world WAS created 6,000 years ago, and sinners DO get burned in Hell, and the second coming is due NOW, so Armageddon in the form of a nuclear war with Russia, China, Iran, or whomever is an attractive proposition, because Judgement Day is hanging on the coattails of Amareggon, and the Faithful are going to be awarded their fluffy white wings by default.

Imagine an America spoiling for this war overseas, while at home educators and scientists are being arrested for teaching evolution ... 18 year olds are sucked up en masse to be trained for the army, according to military conscription regulations ... and no one, anywhere, can buy a condom because contraception has been banned.

Imaging being 16 or 18 in this world: terrified at the looming prospect of being drafted while the heads of state are trying to bully Russia into firing missiles, so that Armageddon can take place in their lifetime, landing them in the "garden of Eden on earth" which everyone who can't be stuffed into Heaven will inherit while the rest of our billions have been snuffed out for not measuring up to the standards of the entity in charge of this mass murder.

Imaging ... you're 17 ... you're gay, you've always known you were gay. You're dreading the army, either because you're a non-conformist; or because you know your secret will be out and you'll be victimized by instructors and peers alike. You don't have a choice about enlisting: you just GO when they tell you. And if you're victimized, it'll be your own fault, and you know some of the abuse is bound to be sexual ... and no one has a condom, because they're illegal.

You're 17 and gay, just coming out, or wanting to ... and the politicians are delighted to start World War III, because they have warm bodies by the millions to feed into uniform, and those politicians embrace Armageddon with open arms. You? You're gay, and you've been taught in school all about how the Christian all-father really DID create the world and all things in it ... so the Bible must be true, by extension ... and Hell. You're gay, you're going to burn.

And even if, in the wealth of your 17 year old wisdom, you don't believe a word of this guano, you still can't get a condom: they're illegal. You have 8 siblings under 12 years old, because your mother couldn't get birth control. She was doomed to multiple, redundant, irrelevant pregnancies, and you yourself are doomed to the Russian-roulette of unsafe sex, because an old man in a peculiarly-designed office with no corners, in an ostentatious building painted white all over, believes that contraception in any form is against his God.

Not your God. His. You could be a Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Daoist, Confucian, Jew, Shintoist, Sikh, Wiccan, Jat, Jane, Shamanist, Spiritualist ... not good enough. You live in the old man's country, you obey the laws of his God.

His God says that you have no privilege of safe sex. If you have sex at all, married or not, gay or not, you must run the risk of pregnancy (at best), STDs if you're unlucky, and, at worst, death. AIDS.

The old man has a co-conspirator, a younger woman who believes just as he does. She's such a believer, her teenage daughter has been raised to be so ignorant, she's unwed, underage, pregnant ... and seemingly proud of it. Proud of the blind, idiotic ignorance, that is ... she doesn't know any better, and is happy not knowing.

Very soon, in this scenario, no young people will know any better -- or, if they do, they're caught between a rock and a hard place ... they're kids with rampaging hormones. Gay or straight -- it hardly matters. They're 16, and if they don't want to get pregnant, or get sick and dead, they're facing a lifetime of celibacy.

Imagine: you're 17 and gay, knowing for a fact that God is going to burn you as a miserable sinner when you die, and you'll never have sex as long as you live -- if you want to live very long that is, because AIDS is waiting for you, since safe sex was legislated to be as illegal as grand theft auto, insider trading and abduction.

Fact: The only thing that slowed the AIDS epidemic in thinking, rational, realistic free world countries was sex education and free access to condoms.

Fact: Sarah Palin and John McCain oppose sex education and contraception.

Fact: Abstinence for birth control or safe sex is utterly ineffective.

Fact: ban contraception, and the population will blow out on one hand, while AIDS will quickly return to the epidemic proportions we all feared 20 years ago.

Fact: Continental North America cannot support a population of 500 million plus, where everyone wants the right to live the American lifestyle. The resources are not there to allow the lifestyle; the big population means everyone has to accept a lot less ... except the mega-rich and the politicians, of course ... while the atmosphere declines, the climate continues to change, the oceans gradually expire, and global food reserves plummet.

Imagine an America 50 years from now, with 750 million people, most living in second world conditions, some sitting along drought-stricken roadways, dressed in rags, and holding out their rice bowls as better-off folks pass by. The very poor are starving. The children are the worst; big-bellied and hollow-eyed, 40% of them were born with AIDS; they won't live to be adults, even if someone feeds them as they drive by. Fuel is as scarce as food; when the giant storms come through, and the forest fires and earthquakes and tornadoes, there are too few resources to fight them, or pick up the pieces afterward. And the gay community...

The gay community is very small, as it always has been, and must be, since being gay is comparatively rare in the community at large. The gay community supports its own, in secret societies where people stick together, share what little they have ... and everyone is a criminal. They're smugglers, or they buy and use smuggled goods, both of which which carry a hefty prison sentence.

They smuggle condoms, and some of them are getting rich off it. America has a history of this; this bizarre, absurd scenario has happened before. Last time, it was booze, and it was called Prohibition. Some of 2008's massive fortunes go back to the booze smuggling operations. In 2060, it's the condom smugglers who're getting rich.

Condoms are smuggled in from Africa, where it's easy to get them because Europe, the UN, the WHO and so on, literally bomb Africa with them, to keep AIDS and the population under control. But the UK and WHO are not allowed to bomb America with them. There's another old man in a weird room with no corners whose God won't allow it.

However, the WHO can supply the contraband, if a few brave, foolhardy people will run the gauntlet of the Secret Service, the Army -- all the high-tech security services that were whipped into shape to fight the War Against Terror. Those systems are already in place; for the love of God and the hope of Salvation, conscripted 18 year olds who've been indoctrinated in Bible-babble all their lives, will turn the high-tech against the contraceptive smugglers ... and why not? They're only fags, only poofs, aren't they? They're going to burn in Hell eventually anyway, why not send them there right now -- who says it's not their time to go and start a-roasting? SMS to Satan: fire up ovens nxt bunch hedng ur way.

The new generation of heroes run the gauntlet of God's Own, flying light planes under the radar and landing in remote places. They're gay, they're smart, they're going to survive his long, slow holocaust: it is written that The Crash is coming, very soon. Climate, weather, over-population, drought, famine, rampaging incurable disease -- it's been coming on since the presidential elections of 2008, it's been a half century slide to the very gates of hell, but at the end it will be frighteningly quick.

The great storms of 2059. The drought years of 2047-59. The famine of the 2040s and 50s. And the AIDS pandemic of 2045-62 which, at its height, killed 400 million people, when the dead were buried in mass graves, because the resources were unavailable to deal with them properly ... though there was plenty of praying over the corpses. For what that was worth.

It was the AIDS that provided the final straw. The Army and security services were riddled with it, because of the illegality of condoms and the indoctrination which made forcibly conscripted gay kids into too-easy targets. When the army collapsed, in the same year as the famine, drought, water shortages, storms, fires, and pandemic ... it was all over.

Except for the gay community, which supported and protected its own, and from which the future's new heroes had already emerged.

...

This scenario is science fiction, but its foundations are being set in concrete right now. You don't believe me? I'm going to give you a bunch of links ... not to SF and fiction sites, but to political sites. Go there. Read. Think. Each one of these links will also click through to many others ... click there. Read. The facts are front of you. (And, you think the Islamic extremists are not laughing up their sleeves at this three-ringed circus, and encouraging the likes of Palin and McCain? They stand to win the God War, hands down, without firing another shot ... and anyone in the rest of the world who can see what's happening is already running scared.)

http://www.americablog.com/2008/07/what-is-john-mccains-problem-with-birth.html What is John McCain's problem with birth control?
[Outtake: ...it's not that McCain didn't want to talk about Viagra. It's that he didn't want to talk about birth control. And it's not that McCain isn't familiar with either the pill or Viagra -- it's that for McCain, birth control is a politically touchy subject.Believe it or not, many wingers think birth control should be made illegal. Case in point: Mike Huckabee. And McCain doesn't want to run afoul of them.


http://www.usnews.com/blogs/erbe/2006/4/24/the-antiabortion-t-shirt-is-here150is-the-no.html The antiabortion T-shirt is here–is the no-birth-control bumper sticker next?
[ Outtake: Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist Susan Paynter writes today that birth control is the next target for religious conservatives (and by inference, their president). She received an E-mail from a Christian antiabortion group called No Room for Contraception. She writes that it said, "There can be no common ground [on birth control], the No Room folks objected, insisting that no 'artificial contraception' of any kind can be effective in preventing abortion."
She goes on, "And, just recently when Page [an abortion-rights author] was debating Jim Sedlak of the American Life League, she asked him about the sweeping South Dakota abortion ban. His response? It isn't a perfect law. If it were a perfect law, it would ban contraception, too, he said."
So, ladies and gents, hang on to, or perhaps, stock up on, your pills, IUDs, and condoms, 'cause they're next.]


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-jan-schakowsky/warning-to-women-mccain-p_b_125809.html Warning to Women [and the community! -MK]: McCain-Palin are Dangerous to Your Well-Being
[Outtake: * Speaking of rape, when Palin was Mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, her police department charged victims of rape for the rape kits that are needed for investigating this devastating crime. These kits cost between $300 and $1200. It took a state law passed in 2000 to stop the practice in Wasilla. Alaska Governor Tony Knowles said at the time, "We would never bill the victim of a burglary for fingerprinting and photographing the crime scene, or for the cost of gathering other evidence. Nor should we bill rape victims just because the crime scene happens to be their bodies."* It's bad enough to be anti-choice, but those two are really anti-birth control too. McCain voted that even insurance companies that cover Viagra don't have to cover prescription birth control.* They are against teaching about sex, despite the problems of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, as well as the challenge of teen pregnancies. Both McCain and Palin are for abstinence-only sex education and against comprehensive, age-appropriate health education.]



http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/01/AR2008090102305.html TheLesson of Bristol Palin
[ Outtake: The 2008 Republican Party platform acknowledges that "each year, more than 3 million American teenagers contract sexually transmitted diseases, causing emotional harm and serious health consequences, even death." It expresses support for "efforts to educate teens and parents about the health risks associated with early sexual activity and provide the tools needed to help teens make healthy choices."
Then it adds, "Abstinence from sexual activity is the only protection that is 100 percent effective against out-of-wedlock pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases."
Yes, but talking about abstinence turns out to be easier than abstaining. More than 60 percent of high school seniors report having had sex at least once. The message that every family should take from Bristol Palin's pregnancy is: It can happen here. The 2008 Republican Party platform acknowledges that "each year, more than 3 million American teenagers contract sexually transmitted diseases, causing emotional harm and serious health consequences, even death." It expresses support for "efforts to educate teens and parents about the health risks associated with early sexual activity and provide the tools needed to help teens make healthy choices."
Then it adds, "Abstinence from sexual activity is the only protection that is 100 percent effective against out-of-wedlock pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases."
Yes, but talking about abstinence turns out to be easier than abstaining. More than 60 percent of high school seniors report having had sex at least once. The message that every family should take from Bristol Palin's pregnancy is: It can happen here.]

Anyone for a Valium? Or two?!