So the United Nations is saying “oops” and is releasing a report that says the wordwide AIDS epidemic isn’t quite the catastrophe it’s been saying it is for the past decade or so.

I like this passage best:

Until recently, most [India AIDS] estimates were made by giving anonymous blood tests to some young women who came into public health clinics because they were pregnant or feared they had a sexually transmitted disease; those results were expanded with statistical models.

But epidemiologists have realized that such a method — usually applied in big urban clinics because it was more efficient — oversampled prostitutes, drug abusers and people with multiple partners, and ignored rural women. Then the statistical extrapolations exaggerated those errors.

I expect a strikingly similar passage to be written somewhere down the road in regards to global warming.

This is yet another reason to hate the U.N. They ratchet up the hyperbole over some supposed worldwide catastrophe to a point where everyone is afraid to breathe. Then they spend a decade forcing the most wealthy nations on earth to do something about it (i.e. give away billions of dollars), and of course the U.N. decides it’s the best entity to manage the crisis and the money that comes with it. Then, down the line, when the supposed catastrophe has been milked for all it’s worth, the U.N. says “our bad” after someone calls bullshit on them — in this case it’s the US Agency for Int’l Development — and proclaims that while shit is bad, shit ain’t nearly as bad as we thought. But thanks for the cash! Here’s nothing in return!

Steve Czaban, a sports talk radio host, said it best in his blog in terms of the latest worldwide crisis:

And yet, people still want to think Global Warming is not the greatest attempted swindle in the history of mankind. Nah! Couldn’t be! Why would the United Nations LIE to us in attempt to get MONEY???

Because some dumb fucks will believe anything. And they’ll believe it over and over.