Playing with numbers

Just watched House of Numbers, about the HIV / Aids epidemic. (see also: www.houseofnumbers.com) It's focussed on one thing: The statistics.

In the medical world we currently have two major deceases that receive billions in funding without creating results: Cancer and HIV/Aids.
For cancer the diagnose is simple. If you have tissue that can live without oxygen it's a cancer. There is no cure, people say. Other scientist claim to have found a cure but it's not profitable due to being 'alternative' and rejected by health organisations or because it can't be patented. (there was a follow up article on May 16, 2011. following the hypothesis of Otto Warburg) And if there is a cure, for example: smart bombs, the results are buried away or not made common knowledge.

For aids the results are not conclusive. Turns out that, not only, interpretation of the tests vary, but also that all tests have a clause stating: Further testing is needed.
Meaning that there is actually no conclusive test available and you can be tested positive in one country and negative in another. Also: you could be tested positive one day and negative the next.

Cooking up numbers is done regularly. As they say: 90% of all statistics are made up. Most of it is political. First, lets look at a bit of history. Polio vaccination in the US was instituted by Franklin D. Roosevelt. He wanted to eradicate the disease that caused him to be bound to a wheelchair.
From Fear of the invisible:

I found firm evidence that the regulatory authorities had employed from 1960 another weapon from their armoury to bring down the numbers of reported polio cases. They promulgated new regulations that rewrote the rules for polio diagnosis, effectively wiping polio nearly out of existence by simply changing the rules for polio diagnosis!
In 1956, the health authorities instructed doctors that they were in future only to diagnose polio if a patient has paralytic symptoms for 60 days or more. As polio was diagnosed previously if there were just 24 hours of paralytic symptoms, and as the disease in milder cases frequently lasted less than 60 days, this automatically meant vastly fewer cases of polio would be reported.
Furthermore, it was now decreed that all cases of polio occurring within 30 days of vaccination were to be recorded, not as possibly caused by the vaccine, but as ‘pre-existing'. This regulatory change also ensured that far fewer cases of vaccine failure would be recorded.

In case of the polio disease it was looking bad in politics that a vaccine actually increased the number of polio patients, so cooking up the numbers made it all better again. Vaccines are basically introducing the body with a 'harmless' virus, bypassing the natural defence systems of nose, skin, thyroid glands, etc by injecting the virus straight in the bloodstream. This will make the person sick and thus kickstart the anti-bodies to fight the virus that would normally be stopped by the body's defence system by creating white blood cells to fight of a possible infection before it actually starts.

In cancer there is evidence as well of cooking up numbers. Maybe incidental, but it does change the statistics and thus could be described as 'cooking up the numbers'.
For instance. Until the 1980ties in many countries it was mandatory to do an autopsy when somebody died. This is a very easy way to precisely determine the cause of death.  Often, cancer cells where found, even if those cells where not the cause of death, so cancer numbers where high. When this obligatory autopsy was stopped suddenly the number of people with cancer dropped as well. Researched of woman between their 40's-50's that died in car accidents in America showed that 40% of them developed microscopic cells of breast cancer.
(no direct resource found, quote by William Li)
If you watch the house of numbers, it becomes evident that not only HIV tests are not conclusive but also that pre-existing diseases or symptoms are suddenly labelled HIV/AIDS, inflating the numbers and thus inflating the infections. It seems very clear that if you politicise an issue, statistics are being adjusted/manipulated.

I suggest making up your own mind and doing your own researches. As always. Never take any body's word as absolute truth, as nobody has it. Even scientific truth is made through consensus or "general truth and general laws" and thus is by definition not the absolute truth.

So here's my hypothesis.
First off, it is understood by the general public that having unprotected sex will cause aids and you only need to do it once. True or false? Hmmm, kinda. Lets look at Nancy Padian's research, one that's quoted most often by 'deniers' and debunked the most by 'truthers'.

The current likelihood of male to female infection after a single exposure to HIV is 0.01-0.32%, and the current likelihood of female to male infection after a single exposure is 0.01-0.1%.

Group 1. Aidstruth.org states:

If safe sex practices are followed, and if there are no complicating factors such as those mentioned above, the risk of HIV transmission can be as low as our studies suggests. But many people misunderstand probability: they think that if the chance of misfortune is one in six, that they can take five chances without the likelihood of injury.

Group 2. Reducetheburden.org states

But what should strike the uninformed viewer to the drama as odd, is that her study – the longest and most rigorous of its kind on record – is absolutely and totally censored on the Wikipedia pages devoted to both “HIV” and “AIDS.” Even her own page does not mention the results of her longest study.

 Her study actually shows that condom use and abstention grew from about 30% to about 90% among the subjects. So is it true or false? Nancy Padian suggests the following: Read my study as it is.
So I'll read it as it is and conclude:
We looked at 175 couples where one partner has HIV, did 3384 tests among those couples over ten years where 30% of the couples had protected sex at the start and after 10 years 90% of them. In a maximum of 0.1% of the cases the uninfected partner contracted the HIV/AIDS virus.

So is it true to get infected if we have unprotected sex with an infected person after one time? Sure, the chance is there so it is true.
So what's the reason to bury this particular study as well as the 'smart bomb' study for cancer?
Well, first of, the aidstruth.org group are a group of scientists from the AIDS research field that "contribute to the website in their spare time, and decisions on content are made by the team members in the interest of global public health." with the purpose "to debunk AIDS denialist arguments and prevent further harm being done by AIDS denialists to public health."
So the site is biased from the start, focussing only on saying that the large numbers and the cause of HIV/AIDS is real because it's run by a group of people in the know that want to protect their work for what they get paid for. Same as any corporation that protect the sale of their products through marketing and that tend to downplay any consumer reports.

Secondly it's the "follow the money" theory. I quickly looked at how much is spend on cancer worldwide, but absolute world-wide figures are a bit buried, so to take the US alone: it's an average of 4.9 billion a year between 2005 and 2010 alone. And that's probably not taking in account donations and sorts. So in over 90 years of research (taking the research of Francis Peyton Rous as starting point) the amount of money pumped in is astonishing. AIDS is only discovered and named for the last 30 years. But received billions of money as well.
So it's safe to say that economically it's better to not come up with a solution than do come up with one. It's basically up to the moral obligation of the scientists and pharmaceutical industry to come up with an answer. And if that moral obligation is missing it's in their own interest of survival to bury, downplay or ignore any studies that show a cure.
On the other hand, it's in the interest of the people to not pursue any false claims.

Final point is the timing. And yes, this might be far fetched, so ignore this if you will.
On March 1980 the Georgia Guidestones where erected. Claiming that mankind needs to "Maintain humanity under 500 million in perpetual balance with nature." (that means that today over 6,5 billion people need to disappear)
Soon after, at the end of 1980 AIDS was discovered and, although first claimed to be a homosexual disease, it was quickly known that both sexes could get it by having unprotected sex. As "sex before marriage" was no longer a moral sin, it makes sense to scare the public in order to prevent an explosive growth in population.
Same with cancer, discovery, research and development of different cancers (this link is highly recommended) followed the, then popular, eugenics theories and was founded (and spread) by a known eugenic.
In both cases I can't confirm a correlation, just see coincidence and a pattern: Influential people with money, in the case of Cancer: Rockefeller and in the case of the Georgia Guidestones: Ted Turner, drive towards a cleansing or elimination of large parts of the population and research is being set up. Costing billions, with no end in sight.

Thanks to the internet alternatives do surface but can lack funding and proper research. There are many examples where scientists are portraited as quackery and their research being burned down, stolen, kept under wraps or otherwise disappeared from view. Some of these are indeed quackery, false claims, etc. And one should look closely into the methods and parties involved to make your own decision. To give a few of these examples in different fields: Tesla,(wireless cheap energy; much of his notes and research disappeared)  Dr Royal Rife (stolen documents, vandalising of his lab, etc), Paul Pantone (declared insane and institutionalised because he didn't trust his own layers any more), Dr. Reich (smear campaign) and Stan Meyer (his research disappeared right after his unexpected death). Especially in the fields of Tesla's research and the research of dr. Royal Rife, mankind could be years ahead and live in a completely different world today.
No doubt cancer is a real disease. With aids, looking at the way the statistics are made up and the tests involved I would say that it's being exaggerated but probably real. Just not as big as it's claimed to be and is rather a collection of different illnesses named the same. As the opposite was done with polio where it got differentiated into different illnesses and thus eradicated.
If there is a double agenda, involving economics or even a triple agenda involving eugenics, I don't know. Maybe it's just cases of cause and an opportunity, but undoubtedly big money is involved in prolonging or even growing the problem rather than solving it completely. Maybe we should start the Japanese doctors way: You pay your doctor when you stay healthy for a year. And you don't pay when you get sick. This way it's in the doctors interest to cure you, rather than keep you sick.

What the ^%&$ is going on?

Wikileaks Cable February 2008 "Extremists in Eastern Libya" states that the, now supported, rebels have nothing to loose and the area is a breeding ground for martyrs around the world. It also states that Ghaddafi used to try and keep that area poor, so they wouldn't revolt. Mind you, this region was and is loving their old king very much. The cable ends that the son of Ghaddafi promised to create jobs in the region.
According to this Pravda article, in 2009 Ghaddafi proposed to nationalise the oil companies, influence oil prices and share the profits with the people of Libya. The article also states the cable mentioned in the first link. They further mention the Sinjar documents that establish a fact that a disproportionate part of al-Qaida's network come from Libya. Disproportionate in relation to national populations, not in absolute numbers!
Now, there is the fact that at least one(!) rebel leader fought in Afghanistan against the US.
And these are the same rebels that formed an alternative government that is recognised by part of the world? Ah, it's not that bad... So far France, the EU with exception of Bulgaria and Qatar recognises this rebel government as the ONLY legit government in Libya.
So this "recognised" new government is already making big progress during this civil war. They already established a new central bank. And a new national oil company, and made a deal with Qatar to sell their oil. Qatar being one of the few Arab nations that are left in the coalition! Some others stepped out when air-to-ground strikes began.

Now, don't get me wrong. Ghaddafi has done a lot of bad things, but since 2001 he's on a PR drive to set the record straight. He was more than willing as he has a hot bed of potential Al Qaida fighters in his country. Some that he didn't like, so all international help would be welcome. US awarded his efforts by lifting a decades long weapon embargo back in 2003. EU followed in 2004.

In 2005 the world factbook published figures that Libya had 7.4% of their population living under the poverty line. In March 2011 this figure is corrected to 1/3th of the population. Mind you, that 7.4% was an estimate, but stating "1/3th of the population" is an even worse estimate. (See the history between the February 2011 and the March 2011 entry on wikipedia. Both sources are from the world factbook.
In six years time the poverty rate has more than quadrupled, despite efforts in 2008 to create jobs in the poorest region of Libya (wikicable), despite a call to the government from Ghaddafi in 2009 to nationalise the oilcompanies in Libya (Pravda article) and despite the abolishment of taxes on home grown and imported foods in the wake of the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings.   

I just find it hard to get the facts straight. Either the 7.4% was completely wrong, and other studies do not really support that, or the 1/3 part is completely wrong, just to enhance that Ghaddafi is so rich and his people are starving and that humanitarian aid is needed.
It's not the first time that facts are being distorted to get some UN resolution on the table.

Even though UN resolution 1973 is not fully compliant with the UN charter, especially part 2.4 it did found some grounds on other parts of the charter, buried deeper away (chapter 7). Even though article 2 establish the PRINCIPLES of the whole UN charter.

Now, I think it's safe to say that if the UN, or better: the coalition, is supporting rebels that are, likely to be, al-qaida influenced that it's rather strange that in the neighbouring country part of the coalition is supporting the opposite part. Especially now that that same state is having a civil war on it's own.

War is never good, and it seems hard to live with eachother in harmony. Especially when greed is a very big factor in play. I hope the world would change for the better, but I fear that as long as lies, greed and self interest play the high notes in this world, there will be no solution. These wars, point out hypocrite parties involved that would like nothing more to see one country destroyed, in order to get what they want. While at the same time doing the opposite in another country.
It's just striking that on the day the coalition came together in London to discuss Libya, that in Libya the rebels announce a new central bank. On top of that, they establish a new national oil company. All on the same day. There seem to be a lot of higher forces at stake, and although it's clear that Ghaddafi is getting less popular by the day in his own country and there are many educated people residing in Libya, this seems to be more orchestrated from outside Libya than from within. Only time would have to tell. It already told a tale that is very old in that same continent. And right now, it seems that this tale is not very different.

Did we just started world war III?

The United Nations was founded to establish world peace, use diplomacy and never have a repeat of world war II.
Now this very institute overruled their own chapter, article 2.4 stating:

All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.

And not only was a No-Fly zone imposed to a member state, there are also air to ground missles.  Those missles have nothing, nothing to do with a no-fly zone. Nato needs to pull out, the coalition needs to pull out and we should bring over any leader of a member state of the UN that supports this illigal war to The Hague for a trail. This is an illegal war. And the world is being dragged in.
There was no diplomacy and it seems that grabbing weapons was the only available option. Didn't Ghaddafi tried to win over the world with a charm offensive in recent years? Come on nations, we can do better than this. Yes, it's terrible to what is happening to the people of Libya, but that doesn't give any other nation the right to start a war against another UN member state.

Internet marketing

courtesy of http://www.jamesjordan.tv/tag/internet-network-marketing/ 

(as his copyright was only for 2009)

Pffff, sometimes internet is just not easy.
I needed to make a copy of a video for somebody. So I grab an empty DVD pop it in, start Nero and, wait, 4.7 gig space for a 730 mb video? That's a bit overkill isn't it? Especially for a lightscribe DVD...
Up to the next cd I had. Damn. 700mb space...

So now I have two options:
Simple: put it on a USB drive and bring it over.
Hard: Add more videos and make a proper DVD with a menu and stuff.

Why do I always go for the hard way??
In search of a free DVD movie maker that works I went with the mainstream and choose Sothink Movie DVD Maker. It's free, better than Windows DVD maker, and the only catch is: "Has a prompt text on interface; Leave information on burnt DVD chapter(s) indicating that is created by the free version." Does that mean a little watermark logo on the video? Screenshots? Nothing... So on to the internets for a search. After 10 google pages, mine shows 20 results per page, and about 15 tabs further on the terms "Sothink free movie DVD maker", "Sothink free movie DVD maker review", "sothink free movie DVD maker forum", "free DVD maker text on video", etc. I came to this conclusion:

• Free software is big business, because the amount of websites with free software offering and some copy-paste of the makers website is virtually endless, with dozens upon dozens of links to 'downloads for free software'.
• The program does what it says on the tin.

The only way to test this for sure is to burn it and check. Luckily the program saves to the harddrive if no writeable CD-rom is available! So in the hour I had to wait for the test run I had time to search for a "internet fail" picture.
I finally stumbled on the above picture and that shows exactly why the internet is not about giving information any more, but just leading people to nowhere. It's also surprising how many "marketing gurus" you'll find that sell stuff on the keywords "internet fail". But the only conclusion I have is... ...how to put it nicely. Ah well, let's use Bill Hicks' words: "If you are in advertising or marketing, go kill yourself. Seriously."

Personally I'm against suicide. It's the last thing I would ever want to do, but internet marketing is just getting sicker and sicker, leading to 100s of pages just to create links and links and links. Maybe I'm just old-school and wish to cut out the middle man.
Problem is that, due to this whole thing and my own business, I'm being forced to do the exact same thing. Drive traffic. It seems that it's all about traffic, traffic, traffic. Creating links to make google believe you are popular, creating clutter. "You have to have a clear vision" this so-called "internet millionaire" says. Posing next to a Ferrari owned by millermotorcars.com showing his ultimate vision. I think the best thing to become an internet millionaire is this. Just saying you have a vision and calling yourself millionaire just isn't cutting it. Especially if you are going arseways in creating traffic as the above picture taken from his website shows.

So, what do I think of the DVD movie maker? I don't know. While it's doing it's thing on the videos I discovered it converts all the AVI's to MPG's before creating the DVD. One AVI increased in size, the others decreased. The SRT-subtitle files where embedded automatically, and no sign of "Free" anywhere as a watermark on the videos, but the quality is not what I was looking for due to compression to the mpeg2-format. This was the only available option and it doesn't show on the website that the "Pro" version does have the capability to convert or better yet, no conversion at all.
It only shows a screen for a couple of seconds at the beginning of the movie, claiming it's made by the free version. Which is good. But the conversion from AVI to MPG before making the DVD is a big downside. Just copying the original AVI-versions was almost 4 gig. Using the DVD maker turned it into 4.17gig. I'll skip the whole DVD making process and keep the original files. My friend can only play DVD's on the computer any ways, so it doesn't really matter.
Time wasted, lesson learned: sometimes you just want something, sometimes you have this bright vision and sometimes you're just have to ask for it, but usually, in the end, it just doesn't work that way!