Bent Corner

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued a report stating the HIV in the United States has increased quite a lot:

There are more new cases of Americans infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, than previously believed, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Saturday.

About 56,000 people became infected with HIV in the past year, which translates to about 40 percent more cases than officials had estimated, said Dr. Kevin Fenton, director of the CDC’s National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD and TB Prevention.

I am not at all surprised. When you look at how many celebrities, professional athletes, and even politicians are having children outside of wedlock, it’s obvious that quite a few people are having unprotected sex.

CDC: More Americans HIV-positive than previously believed [CNN]

I don’t get this movie.  It’s supposedly based on the music of ABBA.  Being that the story does not revolve around a queen that dances, I don’t really understand how ABBA music is involved.

I only know one ABBA song.

From what I have been told, the movie centers around a 20-year old girl who is about to be married.  She wants to be walked down the aisle by her father.  The only problem — if you forget for a moment that a 20-year old child so too young to get married — is that she doesn’t know who her father is.

She was raised by a single mother.  She didn’t grow up with a father.

She doesn’t know who her father is because her mother doesn’t know who exactly impregnated her 20 years ago.  Evidently in 1988 she had unprotected sex with three different men on or around the moment her daughter was conceived.  Classy!

I remember 1988.  People were more then a little freaked out over something called AIDS.  This was when most people finally stopped calling it the Gay Cancer and realized that AIDS or HIV, the virus that caused AIDS, was something everyone needed to worry about.  It was something everyone, gay or straight, needed to protect themselves against.

This meant people were starting to be more responsible when it came to having sex.  They were refraining from having unprotected sex with multiple partners.

Maybe the world that Mamma Mia takes place is some sort of alternate world that is free of HIV or other life threatening sexually transmitted diseases.

Then again, maybe Mamma was just a skanky crack whore.

Evidently Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee has a hard time telling the difference between AIDS and a highly contagious and scary disease from the middle ages. Back in 1992 when he was trying to become a U.S. senator, he answered 229 questions submitted to him by The Associated Press. I have to think somebody at the AP kept Huckabee’s answers in a special file. The file was probably entitled, “WHACK JOB”.

Among the things advocated by Huckabee:

• He wrote that, “If the federal government is truly serious about doing something with the AIDS virus, we need to take steps that would isolate the carriers of this plague.”
• He suggested that Hollywood celebrities fund AIDS research from their own pockets, rather than federal health agencies.
• He wrote that, “It is difficult to understand the public policy towards AIDS. It is the first time in the history of civilization in which the carriers of a genuine plague have not been isolated from the general population, and in which this deadly disease for which there is no cure is being treated as a civil rights issue instead of the true health crisis it represents.”

In case you don’t remember, by 1992 we already knew that you couldn’t catch HIV or AIDS from casual contact with those that were infected. As far as infectious diseases go, it’s fairly difficult to contract. You don’t get it from shaking hands with someone or sitting next to them on a bus. Unless you are exchanging bodily fluids with someone who is either HIV positive or has AIDS, you have nothing to worry about.

Even back in 1992, people knew the idea of putting people with AIDS in special camps was a dumb idea. Everyone except Mike Huckabee.