HIV Stupidity

Sorry for being a bit quiet around here. Between the lead-up to the Christmas holiday and a lot of overlapping work deadlines, I’ve been ass-out.

Nothing too deep to share for my return, except to say that I’m instituting a new rule: If you claim that HIV/AIDS was a government creation as either a biological weapon that escaped the lab or an attempt to wipe out certain populations, you are instantly debited 20 IQ points and relieved of any credibility when you attempt to claim you have critical thinking skills.

It’s not that I don’t think the government does nefarious things. It’s not that I don’t believe conspiracies on a grand scale can exist. I mean, I’m willing to concede that crack cocaine might have been promoted secretly by the CIA or something to ruin the inner cities. But HIV and the disease it causes…AIDS…nah?

And here’s why…

The government is capable of monumental stupidity. But when it comes to weapons, it tends to be pretty good at going for either a big bang or supreme accuracy. When the government is looking to kill, it does so pretty efficiently. And when you are dealing with engineered pathogens, you need scientists, and they tend to be smart.

Which is why no one, not even someone as batshit crazy and nasty as the late Kim Jong Il, would weaponize HIV.

You don’t weaponize a sexually transmitted disease. Hell, that has got to be one of the least focused and least efficient ways to disseminate a disease. It’s never going to stay within the community you target, and it won’t infect or kill quickly (the latter item being one of the reasons it won’t stay contained).

Given the effectiveness of the Plague in the Dark Ages, and the deadliness of influenza, not to mention things like smallpox and flesh-eating bacteria, there are any number of way better ways to kill people biologically than to use an STD. I mean, you don’t send out a weapon against people that pharmaceutical science will be able to begin addressing long before it does serious damage to your target population. No, you pick something that gets spread easily by coughing and that kills quickly.

A virus that you have to fuck someone to pass on, and that takes away your immune system?

That’s like trying to kill someone by hammering a bullet into their skull.

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Acts of the Hummus Idol: Those Darn Duggars Edition

While Deacon Blue does things like help raise his adorable (*retch* the cuteness!) little girl and satisfy his artistic side through fiction…and while his wife, Black Girl In Maine, basks in the glow of being #70 on a top-100 list of mom bloggers while also meeting the needs of the poor and disenfranchised through her job…and Son of Blue expands his mind at college in a philosophy program and makes #6 on a top-10 list at Forbes for best free albums of 2010…I languish in service to the Deacon answering your shitty questions.

And to think, I once held thousands of lost souls in my thrall and feasted on their spiritual misery while laying waste to whole cities when they displeased me.

I was feared and respected. And feared. Even that Yahweh guy got his idea to turn Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt from something I did a few hundred years earlier. Then he went and burned down Sodom, which I had helped to found in the first place.

Fuck my (eternal) life.

I, the great and powerful Hummus Idol, will now entertain your questions and grant unto you the wisdom that only a pile of very angry crushed chickpeas, tahini, olive oil and other seasonings can offer. Don’t let the smiling face fool you. I am a fridge-cold killah. Bow down before me, speak your question, and incline your ears or any other convenient part of your anatomy as I spew my advice upon thee.

Q: Man, Michelle Duggar miscarried what was supposed to be her 20th child? Cool! Maybe this will be the wakeup call that the clown car that is her vagina needs to be junked for good. Don’t you agree? – Kevin Shittheal, Austin, Texas

A: For the love of whatever fucking god you worship, have a little compassion! I mean, I’m an evil muthafukkah to be sure, but even I have my limits. The Duggar family may be out of control batshit crazy and promoting a family model that is unhealthy and unsustainable for folks who aren’t media whores, but they were expecting a child. They were ready and willing to pour love (presumably) into that kid’s life along with the insane media circus to which they subject their children (and us). You don’t kick a person when they’re down; most particularly you don’t kick a woman in the uterus when she’s just miscarried.

I mean, shit! I once possessed a nun so I could go to a Special Olympics event and make retard jokes loudly during the event. You should have seen the faces of the parents and coaches and spectators. Good times. A pity my biting wit and sarcastic jibes went over the heads of all but a few of the competitors.

I once mystically compelled a Jewish boy to fill his pockets with slices of deli ham and slices of bacon, and then caused him to gorge on them in front of his family and the rabbi right after he did his Torah reading and gave his little d’var Torah presentation. Oh, joy! Watching the Orthodox Jews in attendance freak out was so cool, though I didn’t get much or a rise of of the Reform Jews, sadly.

Or there were the times I compelled perfectly healthy, reasonably sane, attractive women to not only marry folks like Hugh Heffner and Larry King in recent years but to actually view those men naked on a regular basis, kiss then and have sex with them.

So, you can see, I’m an evil god indeed. And even I think you’ve gone over the line of good taste.

Q: Dude! Did you or the Deacon see this shit? Did you see this story about it? Or this one? OK, I kind of get they wanted photos of the child Michelle had to deliver after miscarrying, to have in their family memories. Sorta. But what the fuck kind of people hold a full-fledged memorial service for extended family and friends over a miscarriage? More importantly, what family takes a picture of the mom holding the dead fetus in her fingers and puts it on a card? And then distributes copies to all the people at the memorial service? And then, after some family member or friend posts that shit online, who the hell sits around not batting an eyelash and being fine with it? Fucking Duggars, that’s who. Somebody get them some help and get them off the damn air! – Leo P. Chestpuffer III, Cicero, Illinois

A: All righty, then. I may have to withdraw most of what I just said to Kevin up above.

Q: I normally don’t like to invoke your unholy powers, but if I give you a brief vacation, will you please render the Duggars irrelevant like you did with Sarah Palin? – Deacon Blue, New England

A: Deal.

(Image by Stewart Butterfield, who is not affiliated with this blog and who doesn’t even know I or my opinions exist, and used under Creative CommonsAttribution 2.0 License)

(Hummus Idol does not speak as a representative or agent of Deacon Blue or anyone else associated with this blog. In fact, Hummus Idol doesn’t exist. He is wholly and completely a manufactured character that acts as an angry facade behind which Deacon Blue can hide for petty entertainment purposes and for times when he needs to be extra crusty and get shit off his chest. That said, you can feel free to shower the Hummus Idol with offerings of jewelry, money or fine art…he will make sure it goes someplace where it is needed.) View complete list of Humus Idol entries here.

Abstinence Only Education: The Ultimate Act of Futility

Every time a conservative person, particularly of the religious persuasion, goes off on how important “abstinence-only” education is, an angel loses his dick.

Hey, the Bible says angels had sex with women at times, so they must have some junk under those white robes. And in this season when the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” tends to get a lot of play (every time a bell rings, a new angel gets its wings)…well, it seems an apropos image.

But back to the topic. Why the hell does this notion of teaching abstinence get so much play? Have all the members of the GOP conveniently forgotten that almost all of them had sex in their teens…before being married? Did they forget that many of their parents had them in their teens and got married primarily because those future Republican politicians and pundits were growing in a young womb?

I’m not saying we should be teaching the Kama Sutra in classrooms and letting teens watch pornos in school, but damn it, they need education about the risks of sex and how to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease. Even loudmouthed fucking Sarah Palin’s teen kid got pregnant while unmarried in the midst of Mrs.-Holier-Than-Thou-Rewrites-History-and-Can-See-Russia-from-Her-Backyard’s efforts to try to drum up a presidential campaign.

Considering how much sexually transmitted disease is out there, and how many STDs are becoming resistant (or already long since have done so) to most available treatments, it is downright criminal to be trying to keep teens from getting access both to knowledge and condoms.

Because you know what? Teens are going to have sex. If they can get a person who’s willing to have sex, they will have sex. I know that I would have, if only the nerdy girls weren’t turning me down for dates just as much as the more popular ones were.

Teens have been having sex before marriage forever. For. Fucking. Ever.

I want conservatives to point me to this magic period in history when teens didn’t have sex before tying the knot. And don’t go back to the 1940s and 1950s and tell me how pure kids were then and how they obeyed their parents and were stalwart bastions of virtue. They got married in high school or right after often because the girl was knocked up.

So, conservatives, let me give you a math equation: Rampaging hormones + penis + vagina = teen sex.

No amount of pushing abstinence-only education will change that. Shepherds back in biblical times were telling their kids to keep in in their robes, too, and they didn’t listen then. They didn’t keep them in their slacks and poodle skirts in the 1950s, either.

So, shut the fuck up already, accept reality and let’s shoot for healthier and safer activities. Education and condoms aren’t going to increase teen sex.

But they might decrease the amount of disease and early pregnancies out there.

The Return of the Thing?

So, my Muse is beginning to flit around inside my head and whisper ghostly entreaties to return to my epic storyline “Cleansed By Fire.”

Yeah, like I need another thing on my plate, right?

Because it’s been so long, and because I had long ago begun to do some rewrites of early chapters as well as adding some new info, I’m thinking of starting over from the beginning.

What say you, dear readers? If you had been reading it before, would you like to see its return?

And if you hadn’t read it before, go click on the damn link above, poke around a bit, and let me know if you’d like to have me circle back the beginning for a version 2.0 of the series.

Yes, in part this is laziness, as running earlier chapters with revisions and additions will give me time to generate new content. So, sue me.

But first, let me know if I should even bother bringing the series back and getting back to a story that will likely be the equivalent of two or three novels.