Impersonation is a crime, even on the Internet

“Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau today announced the arrest of a 49-year-old man for creating multiple aliases to engage in a campaign of impersonation and harassment . . . . The defendant, RAPHAEL HAIM GOLB, was arrested on charges of identity theft, criminal impersonation and aggravated harassment. . . . [perpetrated] in order to influence and affect debate . . . and in order to harass . . .  scholars who disagree with his viewpoint. GOLB used computers at New York University (NYU) in an attempt to mask his true identity when conducting this Internet scheme. . . .
GOLB is charged with Identity Theft in the Second Degree, a class E felony, which is punishable by up to 1⅓ to 4 years in prison; Identity Theft in the Third Degree, Criminal Impersonation in the Second Degree, Forgery in the Third Degree and Aggravated Harassment in the Second Degree, all class A misdemeanors, which are each punishable by up to 1 year in prison”
(News Release, New York County District Attorney, 5 March 2009).

The disputed issues concern the Dead Sea Scrolls, but the legal and other circumstances make the case of some interest to AIDS Rethinkers and HIV Skeptics, who have become quite familiar with harassment and impersonation practiced by HIV/AIDS groupies and vigilantes.

Golb apparently began his campaign in reaction to a museum exhibit featuring work by Robert Cargill. Cargill had set Google Alerts to track material about the Dead Sea Scrolls and noticed suspiciously similar comments coming from an apparent variety of sources. His 2-year investigation, which included tracking IP addresses, is described on the website, “Who is Charles Gadda?”

“Prosecutors said Mr. Golb opened an e-mail account in the name of Lawrence H. Schiffman, the New York University professor who disagreed with Mr. Golb’s father. He sent messages in Professor Schiffman’s name to various people . . ., fabricating an admission by Professor Schiffman that he had plagiarized some of Professor Golb’s work . . . . Raphael Golb also set up blogs under various names that accused Dr. Schiffman of plagiarism . . . . ‘It’s very easy to open an account using any name you want on the Internet. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. But when you start using another person’s true identity for some purpose, you’re crossing the line into a possible identity theft crime or impersonation crime’. . . . ‘We debated the theories,’ Dr. Schiffman said . . . , referring to Mr. Golb’s father. ‘I thought that’s what scholarship is about. You don’t have to impersonate me’” (“Identity-theft arrest in dispute over Dead Sea Scrolls”).

“’I can’t believe this would happen,’ . . . [Schiffman] said. ‘We are supposed to be doing scholarly interchange’” (“U. of C. scholar’s son charged with identity theft, harassment”)

“Schiffman issued a statement after Golb’s arrest: ‘. . . . Reasoned intellectual discourse relies on integrity. When an individual, in seeking to advance a particular view, engages in impersonation and falsehood, he or she undermines the precepts of higher inquiry’” (“The arrest of Raphael Golb”).

“’I don’t know what caused the transition from the proper intellectual discourse,’ Prof. Schiffman said . . . . ‘Usually these things happen because someone hates their ex-wife. But this? Who would do this?’ . . . . ‘It’s the nature of academic life that you have scholars in disagreement. They tend to debate in academic publications such as books and peer-reviewed journal articles, and sometimes at academic conferences,’ Prof. Levitt Kohn said” (“Curse of the scrolls”)

Why the underhanded roundabout rigmarole?
“Mr. Schiffman said that if Raphael Golb had knocked on his office door saying, ‘I think my father’s right, and I think you’re wrong, and is it OK if I come to some conference and bring the reasons why?’, he would have had no objection. ‘The guy could have been a big friend of ours. That’s what’s so stupid about all this’” (Steve Kolowich, “The fall of an academic cyberbully”, Chronicle of Higher Education, 20 March 2009, A1, 8-11).

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Raphael Golb is a lawyer, not an academic. But some academics, too, behave just like that: attempting anonymity, attempting character assassination, being anything but honest, open, straightforward.

Just like Golb, all that the HIV/AIDS groupies and vigilantes would have to do to make their case and demolish their opposition is to cite the published articles that prove HIV to be the cause of AIDS.
Instead of spending countless time in attacking persons and spewing vitriol and making fools of themselves and disgracing their professions, all that the HIV/AIDS groupies and vigilantes would have to do is just cite the articles that prove HIV as the cause of AIDS.
Just cite the articles, and all we AIDS Rethinkers and HIV Skeptics will stop being such annoying thorns in your sides and hair.

So why are those articles not cited?
Because they don’t exist.
The people who should most know are the co-discoverers of “HIV”.
Montagnier, for his part, has consistently denied knowledge of such publications, and has consistently gone further to say that HIV alone does not cause AIDS, that it requires co-factors and a pre-weakened immune system. Indeed, more than 15 years ago, articles from his laboratory showed that “HIV” in the presence of antibiotics does not kill T-cells whereas in absence of antibiotics “it” does, proving that some bacterial type of agent in “HIV” “isolates” is the killer.
Gallo, for his part, has consistently refused to answer requests for the pertinent citations, most recently on the Gary Null radio program, where he offered the consensus of official organizations as proof. Testifying in the Parenzee case, he had even claimed that purification of “HIV” ”isolates” was unnecessary.
All the researchers and groupies who took up “HIV/AIDS” after the Gallo-Montagnier “discovery” have simply taken the matter on faith. They can’t cite the pertinent proofs because they never looked for them. They can’t engage in rational discourse now because of cognitive dissonance: They cannot admit to themselves that they accepted on faith, and built their careers on, a mistaken view that was without proof when they adopted the belief as their own without first looking into its merits.

Statistics….

Here’s an illustration of how to lie with statistics. Have the media disseminate estimates as though they were facts:

“Few sexually active teens in US get HIV test — CDC
Thu Jun 25, 2009 3:08pm EDT
CHICAGO, June 25 (Reuters) – Nearly half the HIV-positive U.S. adolescents and young adults are unaware of their infection, and less than a quarter of sexually active high school students are tested for the virus, U.S. health officials said on Thursday.”
— Unnamed “officials”, easily confused with “experts”
— “Nearly” half giving a spurious sense of exact knowledge
— Giving a number for something that cannot be measured

“Only 22 percent of sexually active high school students are tested for human immunodeficiency virus, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in an analysis using data from a 2007 survey of students in grades 9-12 (ages 14-18).”
— “Sexually active” is self-reported, of course
— So is being tested, since that’s confidential

“people aged 12 to 24 represented 4.4 percent of the estimated 1.1 million people in the United States infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Yet they represented 10 percent of the estimated 232,700 people living with the virus without knowing it.”
— It cannot be known how many are “infected” without knowing it.
— CDC models for the “epidemic” have been shown to be invalid in a number of respects, see The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory.
— Note the misleading precision of “232,700”; so much more impressive than being honest and saying “about 230,000”. Even were the models valid, they couldn’t be more precise than that.

“HIV testing was more common among students who had ever been taught in school about AIDS or HIV infection than among those who had not”
— Hurrah for successful propaganda.

Promises, promises…. “Possible cure for ‘HIV’”

One of the worst aspects of the media coverage of “science” is the explicit aim of bringing the latest and most exciting “news” from the realms of science. To disseminate what has just been announced by some scientist or laboratory or institution of science or medicine is to collaborate in an exercise in self-serving spin which, all too often, arouses totally unwarranted hopes.

An infamous and notorious instance was the “discovery” of “the” gene that “causes” breast cancer. Untold numbers of women will have expected genuine deliverance from having to worry about contracting breast cancer, only to be thoroughly disappointed; and some number of women continue to undergo “prophylactic” removal of the mammaries if they are told that they have that gene. The unwarranted hope and subsequent disappointment has been well described by Elisa Segrave (“Still living in hope”, Sunday Times [UK)], 9 July 1995, section 7, p. 5 — review of Kevin Davies & Michael White, Breakthrough: The Quest to Isolate the Gene for Hereditary Breast Cancer, Macmillan).

In general usage, “science” has the connotation of reliable. If you want to convince people, you don’t say, “It’s been proven”, you say, “It’s been scientifically proven”. If you want to demolish someone’s claim, you can’t be more emphatic than to say, “That’s not scientific”, or perhaps, “That’s not science, that’s pseudoscience”.

Nothing new in science is reliable. Nothing that’s “news” in science is reliable. Real science isn’t news.

The fact of the matter is that reliable “science” doesn’t emerge fully formed from some experiment or statistical survey. There’s all the difference in the world between science now being done, “frontier” science, and the stuff — “textbook science” —  that’s been winnowed away from much chaff through running long gauntlets of being tested and critiqued.

So it strikes me as criminally irresponsible when the media propagate wild and wishful speculation by researchers who are anxious for the spotlight in order to impress their sponsors and potential funders, as when it has to do with a “possible cure for HIV”:

“Treatment of HIV ‘sanctuary’ cells creates path for possible cure: researchers (Amy Minsky, Canwest News Service 21 June 2009)
Scientists have found a new way to fight — and possibly eradicate — HIV, according to a study released Sunday by a team of Canadian and American researchers.”

No doubt in order to emphasize how truly scientific and reliable this news is, that “news” item includes an impressive photograph; whose content and credit line mark it as a “stock” photo having nothing to do specifically with the text of the article or the claim reported in it.

Treatment of HIV ‘sanctuary’ cells creates path for possible  cure: researchers
Photograph by: Guang Niu, Getty Images

“’For 15 years we haven’t had a clue,’ said Dr. Rafick-Pierre Sekaly. ‘But now, we do’.”
What could sound more worthy of trust? Or more likely to arouse hope among “HIV-positive” people who believe the HIV/AIDS story?

“The new ‘weapon’ will combine antiretroviral therapy, which is the current treatment for HIV/AIDS, with a new one the researchers are calling an intelligent targeted chemotherapy.”
Wow! “Intelligent” targeting, no less! At last the jackpot has been sprung!

“A study will begin in September to test the validity of these results. If targeted chemotherapy successfully eliminates HIV, researchers say the feasibility of the treatment will be determined over the next two to three years, with medication becoming available a few years after that.”
So it’s going to another half-a-dozen years? So what, a real cure is worth waiting for, and we can hang on until then with the drugs which, after all, so we’re told, are getting better all the time  and easier to tolerate.

Of course, there are some caveats that excited readers might miss or not fully appreciate:
“the new treatment’s success will be contingent on a patient’s positive response to antiretroviral therapy. . . . Some HIV-positive patients do not respond to antiretroviral therapy. For those patients, zapping the cell will not likely yield any significant results.”
And even when they do “respond” — i.e., when the meaningless viral-load test purports to show “control” of “the virus” — the side effects of the antiretroviral drugs hardly make this a promise of the sort of cure that ill people look for, namely, a return to genuinely trouble-free health.

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ScienceDaily, “Your source for the latest research news”, seemingly presents itself as the place to get reliable information. It covers the same story in the same way:
“Approach For Possibly Eradicating HIV Infection Discovered”
and makes it seem properly trustworthy by mentioning that the relevant “discovery” is appearing in Nature Medicine online and later in the print journal.
No doubt the researchers see nothing wrong in releasing this “news” because of their care to point out that “this is a preliminary finding”; but that caveat loses its import under the weight of the immediately following “we are hopeful that this research discovery will guide us in eradicating HIV infection in the body”.

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Voice of America did not hesitate to tell the world:
“HIV Hiding Places Found”, by Joe DeCapua —
“There’s been a breakthrough in AIDS research”.
Great! A breakthrough! That’s what we’ve all been waiting for, for about 3 decades now.

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I commented in an earlier post on a similarly misguided arousing of hopes for an anti-“HIV” gene-therapy based on the claimed immunity conferred by the CCR5Δ32 gene, even though the actual geographic distributions of “HIV” and of CCR5Δ32 fail to support the notion that it confers immunity.  That trial is still going ahead, of course.

More porn

“U.S. porn industry HIV cases prompt investigation” by Dan Whitcomb; LOS ANGELES, June 18 (Reuters)

“* Investigators conduct surprise inspection of clinic
* Undisclosed HIV cases raise porn industry concerns”

What do you do if there is an Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation monitoring the “porn industry [which] includes about 1,200 actors employed by 200 production companies” so successfully that over the course of 5 years no more than 22 case of “HIV-positive” have been turned up, despite monthly screening of every performer with the most sensitive test used for screening blood? When during the same period, “1,357 porn performers have tested positive for gonorrhea”?

What do you do, if you are a bureaucratic mediocrity who knows only that the performers MUST be at dangerous risk of contracting “HIV”, no matter the clear evidence that they aren’t?

Obviously, you go after that Foundation in hopes of putting it out of business.

“California health officials are investigating the Los Angeles clinic where a pornographic film actress recently tested positive for HIV, saying it has failed to alert local authorities to cases of sexually transmitted disease in the adult film industry.
Investigators from the state’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health on Wednesday conducted a surprise inspection of the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation . . . .
‘We are investigating the clinic,’ Cal-Osha spokeswoman Erika Monterroza told Reuters.
‘All talent goes through them for monthly testing and it seems like this clinic had received positive results for HIV as well as other sexually transmitted diseases and didn’t report them to the county health department,’ Monterroza said.
If AIM Healthcare was found to be in violation of state health laws, she said, Cal-Osha could issue an order shutting down the clinic.”

“Health officials . . . . accused an industry-supported health clinic of failing to cooperate with state investigations and of failing to protect industry workers and their sexual partners. ‘We have an industry that is exposing workers to life-threatening diseases as part of their employment,’ said Dr. Jonathan Fielding, director of public health for Los Angeles County. The latest controversy began Thursday, when the Los Angeles Times reported that an adult-film actress had tested positive for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes AIDS. . . . Co-stars of the woman have tested negative for HIV but have been quarantined from acting for the time being and advised to be retested in two weeks. Dean Fryer, a spokesman for the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health, said the clinic ‘is not cooperative with us. We don’t even know who the employer is in the most recent case, we don’t know who the talent is. . . . There is no reason these infections should be occurring if these employers are following these precautions’” (“22 porn-film actors got HIV since 2004“).

Ignore the evidence, that these workers have evidently been guarded very successfully against this “life-threatening” disease — as I remarked in the earlier post, achieving a far lower rate of “HIV-positive” than any official prevention and education campaign ever has.

Shutting that clinic down would, of course, greatly serve to safeguard the health of those 1200 performers; though it would also be a bureaucratic triumph. The very idea is what I would call REALLY pornographic.

Porn Industry even freer of “HIV” than earlier admitted

“Health Officials Backtrack on Number of HIV Cases in Porn Industry”
17 June 2009, Assoicated Press, Los Angeles:

“County public health officials backtracked on the number of previously unpublicized HIV cases in adult film performers Tuesday, saying they don’t know if those who tested positive were actively working in the industry at the time.
….
Officials also corrected the number of new cases adjusting the figure upward from 16 to 18.”
In other words, there may have been 18, not 16, “HIV-positives” among people not in the porn industry?!?

“The Adult Industry Medical Foundation, the San Fernando Valley clinic that serves the porn industry, said none of the people were actively performing when they were tested. Clinic co-founder Sharon Mitchell said each case involved either a non-performer or an aspiring actor or actress who tested positive, then dropped out of the business. County public health officials said they mislabeled all reports from the clinic as adult performers, when they had no information about their occupations. The clinic was created primarily to serve the porn industry, but also serves other clients. ‘Here’s the bottom line: we’re an HIV testing center,” Mitchell, said. “We don’t just test the adult entertainment industry. We have a lot of people who come who want testing from the general public.’
The female actress who tested positive for HIV at their clinic earlier this month remains the only case detected in a working performer since 2004, Mitchell said” [emphasis added].

“Public Health Director Dr. Jonathan Fielding said . . . ‘I’m sure that AIM provides a useful service to the degree that they prevent performers from performing when they have sexually transmitted diseases or HIV”; “AIM’s efforts are ‘better than nothing,’ but not enough to prevent a life-threatening occupational hazard”.
What is one to say about these bureaucratic HIV/AIDS devotees? He’s just learned that not a single active porn star has been found “HIV-positive” since 2004 even though each one is tested once a month with the most sensitive test available, and most of the performing is done “bareback”, “unprotected”. What more could AIM be doing?! Its record is better than any official prevention campaign has ever been claimed to be.

The lesson seems obvious.
If you want to avoid becoming “HIV-positive”,
while enjoying unprotected sex,
get a job as a porn star.