Re: pink ribbon
jcsynthetics/philip vw
add to and pass email? August 19, 2001 10:25PM |
<HTML>recently i have send a few add to and pass images as email on a bulk sending list into the mail art email network.
I was under the impression that this add and pass strategy was acceptable within the mail art network, and that by doing this electronicaly would be embracing new technology, using it alongside the existing postal system would suggest that with new technologies mail art is allowed to evolve.
unexpectadly i had several emails returned to my inbox with the addition of angry statements explaining that this was by no definition mail art, and for addresses to be removed from my mailing list, which i must say i have since removed out of respect.
i understand that email can be very rapid, and that inboxes can quickly fill up. however i do feel that if a mail artist makes mail art they are subject to whatever comes through their letter box, is it not the same with email inboxs.
id appreciate any comments, thoughts ar the sharing of experience of this, perhapse this can be debated publicaly here
thanks phill x</HTML>
I was under the impression that this add and pass strategy was acceptable within the mail art network, and that by doing this electronicaly would be embracing new technology, using it alongside the existing postal system would suggest that with new technologies mail art is allowed to evolve.
unexpectadly i had several emails returned to my inbox with the addition of angry statements explaining that this was by no definition mail art, and for addresses to be removed from my mailing list, which i must say i have since removed out of respect.
i understand that email can be very rapid, and that inboxes can quickly fill up. however i do feel that if a mail artist makes mail art they are subject to whatever comes through their letter box, is it not the same with email inboxs.
id appreciate any comments, thoughts ar the sharing of experience of this, perhapse this can be debated publicaly here
thanks phill x</HTML>
whiner
complaining August 20, 2001 12:48AM |
<HTML>
phill - it's only a matter of time...
Time Is On My Side (Norman Meade)
Time is on my side (Yes it is)
Time is on my side (Yes it is)
Now you always say that you want to be free
But you'll come running back, you'll come running back
You'll come running back to me
Yeah, time is on my side (Yes it is)
Time is on my side (Yes it is)
You're searching for good times, but just wait and see
You'll come running back...
Go ahead, baby, go ahead. Go ahead and light up the town
And baby, do anything your heart desires
Remember, I'll always be around
And I know like I told you so many times before
You're gonna come back
Yeah, you're gonna come back, baby
Knockin', yeah, knockin' right on my door, yeah!
Time is on my side (Yes it is)
Time is on my side (Yes it is)
Cause I've got real the love, the kind that you need
You'll come running back...
Yeah, time, time time is on my side (Yes it is)
I said, time, time, time is on my side (Yes it is)
I said, time, time, time is on my side</HTML>
phill - it's only a matter of time...
Time Is On My Side (Norman Meade)
Time is on my side (Yes it is)
Time is on my side (Yes it is)
Now you always say that you want to be free
But you'll come running back, you'll come running back
You'll come running back to me
Yeah, time is on my side (Yes it is)
Time is on my side (Yes it is)
You're searching for good times, but just wait and see
You'll come running back...
Go ahead, baby, go ahead. Go ahead and light up the town
And baby, do anything your heart desires
Remember, I'll always be around
And I know like I told you so many times before
You're gonna come back
Yeah, you're gonna come back, baby
Knockin', yeah, knockin' right on my door, yeah!
Time is on my side (Yes it is)
Time is on my side (Yes it is)
Cause I've got real the love, the kind that you need
You'll come running back...
Yeah, time, time time is on my side (Yes it is)
I said, time, time, time is on my side (Yes it is)
I said, time, time, time is on my side</HTML>
Bill Wilson
Re: add to and pass email? August 20, 2001 01:54AM |
<HTML>Phill: your experience will contribute to experiments on the Net from which everyone might be learning. As I have written to Honoria, now revising my general words to her into this personal note to you, Mailart is fully sensory, while the touch of keyboards, and the sight of screens, can be such a sensory deprivation that I reach for peanuts to engage my senses. A friend told me that she cannot go on-line without a cup of tea, and has spilled three into her keyboard. The personal, even intimate, communication is the issue. People can take only so much impersonality masked as personal attentions, as when a salesperson telephones in the tone of an old friend, calling me by my first name. If mailart is art, then it must face issues of individual and personal expressiveness, and the Internet assumes the same challenge. I figure that people wanted to hear from you in all your charming peculiarity, and that they felt frustration. Here is where you can contribute: what are your own feelings when receiving a communication more or less automatically and impersonally? What satisfies you in an exchange without the slant of a person adapting a message to you, perhaps before relaying it? You can testify as a witness who takes pleasure in the very same style and content of communications as displeases other people. You may be bringing news of a different, and perhaps emerging, sensibility. Wallace Stevens wrote about modern art and poetry as ?The poem of the mind in the act of finding/ What will suffice?? If you can explain your values, when that which suffices for you obviously does not suffice for other people, we may all be able to respond more aptly to each other, and to think more clearly within these machines.
Mailart, which got delivered and gets delivered by an indifferent and impersonal postal system, can engage visual, tactile, and aural senses, and perhaps taste and smell could be involved. Ray Johnson thought even about a person?s spit on the back of a stamp, of course in the days before self-sticking stamps, so mailart could include the use of the tongue and the flavor of mucilage. Can you see how people might want to preserve details as individual as the moistening of a stamp, somehow, in the transpositions of mailart networks onto e-mail networks? People have mailed coconuts and envelopes fragrant enough to alert the sniffing dogs. The goal has been as intense a physiological experience as can survive the systems. Even gently folding and unfolding a piece of paper involves energy that manifests as a sound, albeit a quiet one, but I know that the sound is there, and listen for it. What within your experience is so different that you are satisfied with mechanically mediated ?art?? Can you understand that computerized messages, even more mechanized than the postal system, can feel like yet another insensitive assault on one?s sensitivities? The sounds of the computer are to mailart as a synthesizer is to music. I write as one whose teen years were saved by Les Paul and Mary Ford, hence as open to electrifications when they amplify and enhance sounds which are personal to the point of idiosyncratic. However I have recently been jolted by a young artist pressuring a synthesizer to simulate music. How could he be pleased with automated sounds when he paints with splashes and drips? Almost two centuries ago Beethoven mocked the metronome, so that the history of capricious individual aesthetic expressions in relations with mechanizations has a distinguished history. Anyway I open envelopes noisily, in a style that I guess fits my character, hence expresses my private music, even if the expression is impossible to convey with words.
In my experience, the technological progress of an Internet network challenges the personal in at least two ways: 1) by pretending to be personal while being mechanically indifferent to an individual who is identified as a consumer by a computerized profile; 2) startling invasions of privacy as the personal is violated. I am assaulted by a machine recommending books, CDs or videos that it calculates fit my personal taste. I prefer the instincts of friends who guess that I might enjoy their improbable recommendation, not a recommendation deduced from algebras and probabilities. To me sometimes the computer sometimes seems more a depletion of the sensory than a visual and tactile feast. So can you sympathize with people who prefer an e-mail message tailored to them as individual recipients, perhaps marked indelibly with the personality of the person who has originated the message? Could you comment on how you respond to an impersonally transmitted item, when it is unlikely to convey feelings across the Internet? Do you try to pump feelings into your constructions? I find myself becoming strident in tone to get my voice to hover above the impersonalities and indifferences of this glaring computer-screen. The Internet Network needs to work out a phenomenology of the computer, its sights and sounds, and perhaps the touch of the keys, along with the amazement that occasionally a person seems to pop out of virtual space alive onto the screen. To borrow from Percy Shelley for this occasion, sometimes a message is like a heart plucked alive from the body of the Internet. But perhaps that livingness is not universally desired, in which case, I would like to learn more about the qualities that do seem desirable. A message of any kind unaccompanied by feelings can be rather forlorn. The most sensory messages I have received have been the few that have made me laugh, but that response, merely mine, is no certain evidence about the content of the other person's communications. The challenge for an aesthetic of the Internet is huge precisely because of unfeeling mechanizations. That impersonality, as a quality of the messages you forwarded, apparently does not trouble you. However, I?m guessing about you as a person, but would rather hear you speak for yourself. You may have, or you may be, new information which could go toward working out rules of responsive and responsible communications, and standards of aesthetic taste, appropriate to a novel practice and theory of art within the Internet. How about it? Bring us news.</HTML>
Mailart, which got delivered and gets delivered by an indifferent and impersonal postal system, can engage visual, tactile, and aural senses, and perhaps taste and smell could be involved. Ray Johnson thought even about a person?s spit on the back of a stamp, of course in the days before self-sticking stamps, so mailart could include the use of the tongue and the flavor of mucilage. Can you see how people might want to preserve details as individual as the moistening of a stamp, somehow, in the transpositions of mailart networks onto e-mail networks? People have mailed coconuts and envelopes fragrant enough to alert the sniffing dogs. The goal has been as intense a physiological experience as can survive the systems. Even gently folding and unfolding a piece of paper involves energy that manifests as a sound, albeit a quiet one, but I know that the sound is there, and listen for it. What within your experience is so different that you are satisfied with mechanically mediated ?art?? Can you understand that computerized messages, even more mechanized than the postal system, can feel like yet another insensitive assault on one?s sensitivities? The sounds of the computer are to mailart as a synthesizer is to music. I write as one whose teen years were saved by Les Paul and Mary Ford, hence as open to electrifications when they amplify and enhance sounds which are personal to the point of idiosyncratic. However I have recently been jolted by a young artist pressuring a synthesizer to simulate music. How could he be pleased with automated sounds when he paints with splashes and drips? Almost two centuries ago Beethoven mocked the metronome, so that the history of capricious individual aesthetic expressions in relations with mechanizations has a distinguished history. Anyway I open envelopes noisily, in a style that I guess fits my character, hence expresses my private music, even if the expression is impossible to convey with words.
In my experience, the technological progress of an Internet network challenges the personal in at least two ways: 1) by pretending to be personal while being mechanically indifferent to an individual who is identified as a consumer by a computerized profile; 2) startling invasions of privacy as the personal is violated. I am assaulted by a machine recommending books, CDs or videos that it calculates fit my personal taste. I prefer the instincts of friends who guess that I might enjoy their improbable recommendation, not a recommendation deduced from algebras and probabilities. To me sometimes the computer sometimes seems more a depletion of the sensory than a visual and tactile feast. So can you sympathize with people who prefer an e-mail message tailored to them as individual recipients, perhaps marked indelibly with the personality of the person who has originated the message? Could you comment on how you respond to an impersonally transmitted item, when it is unlikely to convey feelings across the Internet? Do you try to pump feelings into your constructions? I find myself becoming strident in tone to get my voice to hover above the impersonalities and indifferences of this glaring computer-screen. The Internet Network needs to work out a phenomenology of the computer, its sights and sounds, and perhaps the touch of the keys, along with the amazement that occasionally a person seems to pop out of virtual space alive onto the screen. To borrow from Percy Shelley for this occasion, sometimes a message is like a heart plucked alive from the body of the Internet. But perhaps that livingness is not universally desired, in which case, I would like to learn more about the qualities that do seem desirable. A message of any kind unaccompanied by feelings can be rather forlorn. The most sensory messages I have received have been the few that have made me laugh, but that response, merely mine, is no certain evidence about the content of the other person's communications. The challenge for an aesthetic of the Internet is huge precisely because of unfeeling mechanizations. That impersonality, as a quality of the messages you forwarded, apparently does not trouble you. However, I?m guessing about you as a person, but would rather hear you speak for yourself. You may have, or you may be, new information which could go toward working out rules of responsive and responsible communications, and standards of aesthetic taste, appropriate to a novel practice and theory of art within the Internet. How about it? Bring us news.</HTML>
time
time is on my side August 20, 2001 03:32PM |
Dragonfly Dream
Re: add to and pass email? August 20, 2001 03:32PM |
<HTML>Hi Phil,
I am not very good at the add to's and pass on's. If they come via snail mail they sit on my desk waiting for inspiriation. Or they get a simple rubberstamp on them and I add them to some other mailing. If I don't get the thing I don't do anything and I stick it back into an envelope and send it to someone else. There are tons of xerox copy add to's these days. I personally don't get into these. So they usually get sent on to someone else. Now, a amil art friend did one up for me and I was the recipient of many altered and added to piece. Since they came to me they were a gift and I enjoyed them. But the others that ask me to do something can be thought of as work, and I don't want to work. I want to play. Now if something is sent via email it really doesn't have much of a chance. Unless it is just to show me new work or something, to share. If asked to add on it might happen but usually not. I have many other projects on my plate. As for Phil's recent sending I think it was a postbox and I did download it and consider doing something but time got in my way and I did not. With email, there seems to be a sense of urgency. People tend to not even take the time to say Dear Mary, they just quickly respond, some forget to even sign thier name. While mail art can be savored, touched, thought about and time taken. It takes me more than a month to respond to a sending simply because I get so much wonde4rful mail art.
Dragonfly Dream</HTML>
I am not very good at the add to's and pass on's. If they come via snail mail they sit on my desk waiting for inspiriation. Or they get a simple rubberstamp on them and I add them to some other mailing. If I don't get the thing I don't do anything and I stick it back into an envelope and send it to someone else. There are tons of xerox copy add to's these days. I personally don't get into these. So they usually get sent on to someone else. Now, a amil art friend did one up for me and I was the recipient of many altered and added to piece. Since they came to me they were a gift and I enjoyed them. But the others that ask me to do something can be thought of as work, and I don't want to work. I want to play. Now if something is sent via email it really doesn't have much of a chance. Unless it is just to show me new work or something, to share. If asked to add on it might happen but usually not. I have many other projects on my plate. As for Phil's recent sending I think it was a postbox and I did download it and consider doing something but time got in my way and I did not. With email, there seems to be a sense of urgency. People tend to not even take the time to say Dear Mary, they just quickly respond, some forget to even sign thier name. While mail art can be savored, touched, thought about and time taken. It takes me more than a month to respond to a sending simply because I get so much wonde4rful mail art.
Dragonfly Dream</HTML>
stretch
envelope August 20, 2001 03:53PM |
Dragonfly Dream
Re: envelope August 21, 2001 03:54PM |
immediacy
changes things August 21, 2001 08:02PM |
Dragonfly Dream
Re: changes things August 21, 2001 08:28PM |
programs used
& photoshop August 22, 2001 03:14AM |
kiyotei
things changes August 21, 2001 09:54PM |
<HTML><a href="[www.art.net] the Petri dish, strange confluences of fractals and pixels occur!</a>
kiyotei
(blue foaming test tube)</HTML>
kiyotei
(blue foaming test tube)</HTML>
read it and weep
aids August 22, 2001 03:36AM |
<HTML>www.frontpagemag.com
Unnecessary Deaths from AIDS
By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | August 21, 2001
URL: [www.frontpagemag.com]
A NEW REPORT from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveals that 40% of people infected with the AIDS virus didn?t realize they had the virus for ten years after being infected. They only became aware of their condition through the appearance of full-blown AIDS. The same government agency estimates that more than 800,000 Americans are infected with the virus.
There are two grim and unarguable consequences of these statistics. First, those who carry the virus undetected deprive themselves of the enhanced possibilities of survival through early treatment by drugs. By the time AIDS becomes full blown, the body?s immune system has already been severely damaged and the patient is subject to life-threatening infections and cancers. But from an epidemiological view, this isn?t even the worst news. The
presence of the virus in the blood and sperm of the infected means that if they are sexually active or sharing drug needles they are unknowingly infecting others. According to the government?s own estimates, this means that roughly 320,000 Americans are out there infecting unsuspecting others all the time.
This march of death is made possible by the surrender of public health authorities to the pressures of political groups opposed to what once had been the standard procedure for fighting epidemic diseases like AIDS: testing. Without testing of at-risk individuals and groups, there is no way to insure that individuals will know their lives are in danger, or that they are endangering the lives of others. Yet irresponsible zealots have successfully removed testing from the government?s arsenal of weapons available in the battle against AIDS. They have even managed to pass laws against testing, in states like California and New York, which have by far the largest concentration of AIDS cases, HIV carriers and people at risk.
As I have already observed in previous columns, AIDS is the worst reported story in the history of American journalism. While the media dutifully passed on these new statistics about silent AIDS carriers, there was not a single press query about the government?s lackadaisical attitude towards testing, even though the statistics show that we are in the midst of a monstrous pandemic, which shows no signs of abating. Despite the new drugs, 40,000 young Americans are dying every year. Yet the press raised no questions about the need for mandatory measures, made no comments about the political obstruction of public health methods like contact tracing and reporting, and had no observations about the feckless surrender of public health officials to the prejudices and paranoia of special interest groups. How unlike its reporting on cigarette smoking or guns.
For more than a decade now, the word "prevention," as used by the chief government agency for combating epidemic diseases, has been a cruel ? not to say Orwellian ? deception. By "prevention" public health officials mean only voluntary ? mainly educational ? measures. But the experience of the last two decades has clearly shown that such measures are inadequate to the task of actually containing the AIDS epidemic.
And this conclusion can be drawn directly from the conference sponsors? own summary of the evidence!
For nearly 20 years, HIV and AIDS have presented historic challenges to our nation?s public health, scientific, and medical communities. It is estimated that in the Untied States, more than 800,000 persons are living with HIV. The number of people living with AIDS is increasing as effective new drug therapies keep HIV-infected persons healthy longer and dramatically reduce the death rate. Despite extremely beneficial advances in HIV/AIDS treatment in recent years, the epidemic is far from over. An estimated 40,000 Americans become infected with HIV every year, and more than half of these are young people under the age of 25. The HIV epidemic is increasingly affecting communities of color ? particularly young people and women. The majority of the new infections among men, nearly 60% continue to be among men who have sex with men. Recent evidence suggests there has been a resurgence in unsafe behaviors among some communities of men having sex with men?
("Conference Background" CDC website)
In this situation, with hundreds of thousands of individuals unknowingly carrying the virus and infecting healthy people, "prevention" is officially confined to voluntary measures that mainly involve "counseling." In other words, if you are willing, you can get tested. If you are willing, you can get information. If you are willing, you can wear a condom and not use someone else?s needle. But we know that not enough people are willing. There is no community that has been bombarded with more information about AIDS than the gay community, and yet AIDS is on the rise in the gay community, which accounts for 60% of new infections.
As for voluntary counseling, a frightening study of Seattle men, which was reported by David Brown in the Washington Post, found that among gay men who contracted a venereal disease only 50% got any counseling about safe sex for AIDS. In other words half the gay men who were treated by doctors for venereal disease were not warned that they could get AIDS if they continued practicing sex without condoms. If, after the expenditure of billions of dollars on AIDS education and prevention programs, this group did not get counseling, one can hardly expect the necessary information to reach groups which do not have venereal diseases, are symptom free, and may be having sex with individuals who are completely unaware that they are carrying the virus. Yet no one in the AIDS public health community is even discussing the need for mandatory testing, let alone sanctions against reckless behavior endangering the lives of others.
The only possible conclusion is that 40,000 deaths a year from an entirely preventable disease is perfectly acceptable to the American government because it is perfectly acceptable to the special interest groups that make up the AIDS lobby.
Last week (August 12-15) the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention held a gathering in Atlanta nobly titled the "Second National HIV Prevention Conference." But ninety-seven pages of conference agenda, listing more than two hundred conference panels, failed to turn up a single one devoted to the question of whether there should be mandatory testing of any at-risk group whatsoever, whether drug-addicted pregnant women, visitors to VD
clinics, or residents of neighborhoods with a high incidence of the disease. Not one. Instead there were panels like "HIV Prevention Programs for Women," which discussed topics like "Women of Color: Doing It for Ourselves" and "Brushing Up On HIV Prevention at the Beauty Parlor." The one panel devoted to "Testing Policy Issues" that even came close to raising a question about the efficacy of testing asked "Does the Availability of Anonymous Testing Really Affect HIV Testing Rates?" It was a question that seemed to answer itself ? a sure sign of enforced conformity. (How about, for example, "Does the fact that testing is anonymous hinder our ability to combat this epidemic?")
I asked Jessica Frickey of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about mandatory testing and she confirmed that there was "no discussion of mandatory testing at the conference." She then added "the CDCP doesn?t recommend mandatory testing" and explained that "people are scared of getting HIV tested because they might not get insurance." Well, there are obvious answers to this objection. First, insurance companies will test for AIDS
anyway, and second, if this were the case, why not have the government provide an insurance program for those who test positive for AIDS, alongside a program of required tests that might actually advance efforts to curtail this mass killer? AIDS activists have long threatened that if testing is made mandatory, those at risk will avoid both tests and treatments. It is this obstructionist attitude by people who claim to be leaders of the battle against the disease that has created the present situation.
I asked David Brown ? the Washington Post staff writer who reported that 40% of the infected remain blissfully unaware of their lethal potential ? why the press is not asking about the need for mandatory testing. He said "the media profession has accepted the fact that mandatory testing is off the agenda. Mandatory testing even for pregnant women has been rejected." This is true, but it is like saying that bans on abortion have been rejected. No reporter in his right mind would ignore the fact that a lot of people remain on the other side of the issue. Are there no doctors, no epidemiologists, no scientists involved with AIDS who think that the failure of existing measures calls for stronger ones? Of course there are. But in an atmosphere where advocating testing is not politically correct, reporters are not going to seek them out.
When I pressed Brown, he said that mandatory measures were off the table because there was "no precedent for coerced medical treatment of adults in the United States." But every couple getting a marriage license thirty years ago was required to get a test for syphilis. This was a measure to control an epidemic that was no longer even lethal. Individuals who are recognized to be a medical threat ? e.g., tuberculosis carriers ? can still be legally forced to take a full course of drugs in order to prevent contagion. Yet getting tested is hardly as invasive as taking a dose of medicine. Why not take this step if it means saving hundreds of thousands (or even tens of thousands) of lives?
Of course, testing is just the tip of the AIDS iceberg. Real prevention of new AIDS infections would also involve reporting and contact tracing, and the closing of infection sites (like public sex clubs). All these methods were proven indispensable in fighting contagious diseases before AIDS. Yet all the political battles over whether to deploy these weapons against AIDS were lost to the AIDS lobby more than a decade ago.
Not coincidentally, this lobby is funded by the epidemic it fuels. One of the facts most studiously ignored by a pliant media is that AIDS activist organizations have grown rich off the mounting toll of the dead. A whole industry has been created out of the successive failures of current public health policy. The bigger the epidemic resulting from these failures, the more government money available to "AIDS providers." This is not to suggest that AIDS providers want people to die. Obviously they don?t and a lot of their effort is the work of very dedicated and idealistic people who have extended themselves to help others. The same however could be said for defense workers in the famous military-industrial complex. The problem is that, in both cases, the symbiosis of service and profit has sinister side effects.
Many people in the AIDS battle who know better ? doctors and scientists for example ? are restrained from advocating changes in AIDS policies that have failed because they are afraid of being cut off from the community on which their work depends. An epidemiologist researching AIDS who strenuously advocates testing and draws attention to the flaws in current policy, for example, may find the grants on which his work depends cut off. Efforts
to promote stronger public health measures including the closing of infection sites have met powerful resistance at every stage of the epidemic by people who represent the at-risk community. Explaining why misguided policies go unchallenged, Gabriel Rotello, a founder of ACT-UP who has had second thoughts about the wholesale discarding of public health methods observes, "gay leaders frequently made it plain to researchers that anyone who raised questions about gay sexual freedom for any reason, whether ethical or biological, would be equally accused of anti-gay bias. Few researchers were willing to venture into such a political and social hot zone, and the few who did found that they consequently lost influence within the gay male community, a bad position to be in if your research required a high level of cooperation from gay men."
Only an aroused and activist public can break this vicious cycle which has had a crippling effect on the war against AIDS. The idea that heterosexual couples can be forced to take tests for syphilis, which is curable, but gay couples and IV drug users can?t be tested for AIDS, which is not, is absurd. And yet belief in this absurdity is killing nearly a thousand young people in this country every week of every year.
David Horowitz is editor-in-chief of FrontPageMagazine.com and president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture.</HTML>
Unnecessary Deaths from AIDS
By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | August 21, 2001
URL: [www.frontpagemag.com]
A NEW REPORT from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reveals that 40% of people infected with the AIDS virus didn?t realize they had the virus for ten years after being infected. They only became aware of their condition through the appearance of full-blown AIDS. The same government agency estimates that more than 800,000 Americans are infected with the virus.
There are two grim and unarguable consequences of these statistics. First, those who carry the virus undetected deprive themselves of the enhanced possibilities of survival through early treatment by drugs. By the time AIDS becomes full blown, the body?s immune system has already been severely damaged and the patient is subject to life-threatening infections and cancers. But from an epidemiological view, this isn?t even the worst news. The
presence of the virus in the blood and sperm of the infected means that if they are sexually active or sharing drug needles they are unknowingly infecting others. According to the government?s own estimates, this means that roughly 320,000 Americans are out there infecting unsuspecting others all the time.
This march of death is made possible by the surrender of public health authorities to the pressures of political groups opposed to what once had been the standard procedure for fighting epidemic diseases like AIDS: testing. Without testing of at-risk individuals and groups, there is no way to insure that individuals will know their lives are in danger, or that they are endangering the lives of others. Yet irresponsible zealots have successfully removed testing from the government?s arsenal of weapons available in the battle against AIDS. They have even managed to pass laws against testing, in states like California and New York, which have by far the largest concentration of AIDS cases, HIV carriers and people at risk.
As I have already observed in previous columns, AIDS is the worst reported story in the history of American journalism. While the media dutifully passed on these new statistics about silent AIDS carriers, there was not a single press query about the government?s lackadaisical attitude towards testing, even though the statistics show that we are in the midst of a monstrous pandemic, which shows no signs of abating. Despite the new drugs, 40,000 young Americans are dying every year. Yet the press raised no questions about the need for mandatory measures, made no comments about the political obstruction of public health methods like contact tracing and reporting, and had no observations about the feckless surrender of public health officials to the prejudices and paranoia of special interest groups. How unlike its reporting on cigarette smoking or guns.
For more than a decade now, the word "prevention," as used by the chief government agency for combating epidemic diseases, has been a cruel ? not to say Orwellian ? deception. By "prevention" public health officials mean only voluntary ? mainly educational ? measures. But the experience of the last two decades has clearly shown that such measures are inadequate to the task of actually containing the AIDS epidemic.
And this conclusion can be drawn directly from the conference sponsors? own summary of the evidence!
For nearly 20 years, HIV and AIDS have presented historic challenges to our nation?s public health, scientific, and medical communities. It is estimated that in the Untied States, more than 800,000 persons are living with HIV. The number of people living with AIDS is increasing as effective new drug therapies keep HIV-infected persons healthy longer and dramatically reduce the death rate. Despite extremely beneficial advances in HIV/AIDS treatment in recent years, the epidemic is far from over. An estimated 40,000 Americans become infected with HIV every year, and more than half of these are young people under the age of 25. The HIV epidemic is increasingly affecting communities of color ? particularly young people and women. The majority of the new infections among men, nearly 60% continue to be among men who have sex with men. Recent evidence suggests there has been a resurgence in unsafe behaviors among some communities of men having sex with men?
("Conference Background" CDC website)
In this situation, with hundreds of thousands of individuals unknowingly carrying the virus and infecting healthy people, "prevention" is officially confined to voluntary measures that mainly involve "counseling." In other words, if you are willing, you can get tested. If you are willing, you can get information. If you are willing, you can wear a condom and not use someone else?s needle. But we know that not enough people are willing. There is no community that has been bombarded with more information about AIDS than the gay community, and yet AIDS is on the rise in the gay community, which accounts for 60% of new infections.
As for voluntary counseling, a frightening study of Seattle men, which was reported by David Brown in the Washington Post, found that among gay men who contracted a venereal disease only 50% got any counseling about safe sex for AIDS. In other words half the gay men who were treated by doctors for venereal disease were not warned that they could get AIDS if they continued practicing sex without condoms. If, after the expenditure of billions of dollars on AIDS education and prevention programs, this group did not get counseling, one can hardly expect the necessary information to reach groups which do not have venereal diseases, are symptom free, and may be having sex with individuals who are completely unaware that they are carrying the virus. Yet no one in the AIDS public health community is even discussing the need for mandatory testing, let alone sanctions against reckless behavior endangering the lives of others.
The only possible conclusion is that 40,000 deaths a year from an entirely preventable disease is perfectly acceptable to the American government because it is perfectly acceptable to the special interest groups that make up the AIDS lobby.
Last week (August 12-15) the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention held a gathering in Atlanta nobly titled the "Second National HIV Prevention Conference." But ninety-seven pages of conference agenda, listing more than two hundred conference panels, failed to turn up a single one devoted to the question of whether there should be mandatory testing of any at-risk group whatsoever, whether drug-addicted pregnant women, visitors to VD
clinics, or residents of neighborhoods with a high incidence of the disease. Not one. Instead there were panels like "HIV Prevention Programs for Women," which discussed topics like "Women of Color: Doing It for Ourselves" and "Brushing Up On HIV Prevention at the Beauty Parlor." The one panel devoted to "Testing Policy Issues" that even came close to raising a question about the efficacy of testing asked "Does the Availability of Anonymous Testing Really Affect HIV Testing Rates?" It was a question that seemed to answer itself ? a sure sign of enforced conformity. (How about, for example, "Does the fact that testing is anonymous hinder our ability to combat this epidemic?")
I asked Jessica Frickey of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about mandatory testing and she confirmed that there was "no discussion of mandatory testing at the conference." She then added "the CDCP doesn?t recommend mandatory testing" and explained that "people are scared of getting HIV tested because they might not get insurance." Well, there are obvious answers to this objection. First, insurance companies will test for AIDS
anyway, and second, if this were the case, why not have the government provide an insurance program for those who test positive for AIDS, alongside a program of required tests that might actually advance efforts to curtail this mass killer? AIDS activists have long threatened that if testing is made mandatory, those at risk will avoid both tests and treatments. It is this obstructionist attitude by people who claim to be leaders of the battle against the disease that has created the present situation.
I asked David Brown ? the Washington Post staff writer who reported that 40% of the infected remain blissfully unaware of their lethal potential ? why the press is not asking about the need for mandatory testing. He said "the media profession has accepted the fact that mandatory testing is off the agenda. Mandatory testing even for pregnant women has been rejected." This is true, but it is like saying that bans on abortion have been rejected. No reporter in his right mind would ignore the fact that a lot of people remain on the other side of the issue. Are there no doctors, no epidemiologists, no scientists involved with AIDS who think that the failure of existing measures calls for stronger ones? Of course there are. But in an atmosphere where advocating testing is not politically correct, reporters are not going to seek them out.
When I pressed Brown, he said that mandatory measures were off the table because there was "no precedent for coerced medical treatment of adults in the United States." But every couple getting a marriage license thirty years ago was required to get a test for syphilis. This was a measure to control an epidemic that was no longer even lethal. Individuals who are recognized to be a medical threat ? e.g., tuberculosis carriers ? can still be legally forced to take a full course of drugs in order to prevent contagion. Yet getting tested is hardly as invasive as taking a dose of medicine. Why not take this step if it means saving hundreds of thousands (or even tens of thousands) of lives?
Of course, testing is just the tip of the AIDS iceberg. Real prevention of new AIDS infections would also involve reporting and contact tracing, and the closing of infection sites (like public sex clubs). All these methods were proven indispensable in fighting contagious diseases before AIDS. Yet all the political battles over whether to deploy these weapons against AIDS were lost to the AIDS lobby more than a decade ago.
Not coincidentally, this lobby is funded by the epidemic it fuels. One of the facts most studiously ignored by a pliant media is that AIDS activist organizations have grown rich off the mounting toll of the dead. A whole industry has been created out of the successive failures of current public health policy. The bigger the epidemic resulting from these failures, the more government money available to "AIDS providers." This is not to suggest that AIDS providers want people to die. Obviously they don?t and a lot of their effort is the work of very dedicated and idealistic people who have extended themselves to help others. The same however could be said for defense workers in the famous military-industrial complex. The problem is that, in both cases, the symbiosis of service and profit has sinister side effects.
Many people in the AIDS battle who know better ? doctors and scientists for example ? are restrained from advocating changes in AIDS policies that have failed because they are afraid of being cut off from the community on which their work depends. An epidemiologist researching AIDS who strenuously advocates testing and draws attention to the flaws in current policy, for example, may find the grants on which his work depends cut off. Efforts
to promote stronger public health measures including the closing of infection sites have met powerful resistance at every stage of the epidemic by people who represent the at-risk community. Explaining why misguided policies go unchallenged, Gabriel Rotello, a founder of ACT-UP who has had second thoughts about the wholesale discarding of public health methods observes, "gay leaders frequently made it plain to researchers that anyone who raised questions about gay sexual freedom for any reason, whether ethical or biological, would be equally accused of anti-gay bias. Few researchers were willing to venture into such a political and social hot zone, and the few who did found that they consequently lost influence within the gay male community, a bad position to be in if your research required a high level of cooperation from gay men."
Only an aroused and activist public can break this vicious cycle which has had a crippling effect on the war against AIDS. The idea that heterosexual couples can be forced to take tests for syphilis, which is curable, but gay couples and IV drug users can?t be tested for AIDS, which is not, is absurd. And yet belief in this absurdity is killing nearly a thousand young people in this country every week of every year.
David Horowitz is editor-in-chief of FrontPageMagazine.com and president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture.</HTML>
Dragonfly Dream
Re: please August 22, 2001 09:12PM |
jcsynthetics/philip vw
Re: pink ribbon September 09, 2001 09:40PM |
<HTML>as well as wearing a ribon the is a screensaver that can be downloaded from ud.com it processed info on proteins that may be able to be used in the fight against cancer.i have this working on my pc every moment it is on.i think as well as raising awareness its also good to voulenterr a resourse if you have one</HTML>
jcsynthetics/philip vw
Re: add to and pass email? September 09, 2001 09:32PM |
<HTML>your right...email art does seem to have a very quick turn over...if something is in my in box for more than a day it could be considered old....however the ways we can work onto that email art stuff are indeed rapid too........is it just that there is such a bulk of it all we have to select and edit more and more so just to cope and process what is going in???</HTML>
rae's of sun
Re: add to and pass email? August 21, 2001 06:00AM |
<HTML>I did not receive one of your e-mail add and pass things but I would like to comment on the idea.
I do not have any way of altering an image because I do not have the softwear. I do not have the time to learn new softwear or the inclination. I would rather work in my studio with paint/pens/whatever, smell the glue and listen to music.
The computer is in a different part of the house and I look at one most days at my day job.
E-Mail feels too much like work for me.
Sorry
Rae's of Sun</HTML>
I do not have any way of altering an image because I do not have the softwear. I do not have the time to learn new softwear or the inclination. I would rather work in my studio with paint/pens/whatever, smell the glue and listen to music.
The computer is in a different part of the house and I look at one most days at my day job.
E-Mail feels too much like work for me.
Sorry
Rae's of Sun</HTML>
draw
all day August 21, 2001 05:03PM |
jcsynthetics/philip vw
Re: add to and pass email? September 09, 2001 09:34PM |
Sorry, you do not have permission to post/reply in this forum.
YOU are in MAIL ART FORUMS on mailartforums.crosses.net PLEASE REGISTER TO POST! (It is to avoid spam & hack attacks) - Thanks!
| Animals in mail art | AUMA: Identity and Globalization | Crosses of the Earth | Exquisite Corpse | Braumueller | Merlin | PAN-PAZ by C. Padin | Port of Mail Art | Reeperbahn Mail Art | | |
| HOME Crosses.net | Recommend | Site Map | What's New | Search Crosses.Net | |
Crosses.Net is a networking art project in process by mail artist Hans Braumueller. Founded at 1998 in Germany with Merlin. | |
These mail art forums are powered by open source software Phorum. !Peace, please? |  |
Current e-mail art project on crosses.net: Corn.Crosses.Net - Please participate and share the project. Please submit also to Identidad-Globalizacion.Crosses.Net | Impressum