Fooey

I've always thought that the worst thing about Kurt Cobain's suicide in 1994, besides poor Francis Bean losing the wrong parent, was the creation of the crappy band the Foo Fighters. How someone that came out of such a great band that made incredible music could go on to create such pedestrian pop shit is beyond me. But Dave Grohl has made the transition with ease. But I have discovered recently that the Foo Fighters music, as shitty as it is, it's not even the worst thing about the band.

I was reading this incredible Op-Ed in the New York Times the other day, on the 25th anniversary of the first published report of the disease that we now know as AIDS. It was titled Deadly Quackery, and it was about the co-called AIDS denialists and their affect on the policies and attitude toward the disease of the idiot president of South Africa, Thabo Mbeki. Read the article, it is really good. One person that is mentioned in the piece is a woman named Christine Maggiore, an HIV-positive Californian. This is what they say about her:

By courting the AIDS denialists, Mbeki has increased their stature in the United States. He lent credibility to Christine Maggiore, a Californian who campaigns against using antiretrovirals to prevent transmission of HIV from mothers to children, when he was photographed meeting her. Two years later, Maggiore gave birth to an HIV-infected daughter, Eliza Jane, who acquired an AIDS-related infection last year and died at age 3.

I had never heard of this person so I googled her. She runs an organization called Alive & Well and I spent some time looking around their web site. It is absolutely horrifying to read the kind of misinformation she promotes. These groups of AIDS denialists make absolutely outrageous claims that fly in the face of all proven medical science. HIV doesn't cause AIDS, AIDS is not a real disease but a renaming of a group of 29 different diseases that have been around for a long time, HIV isn't transmitted by sex, AIDS is caused by malnutrition and also that it is caused by the drugs created to treat it. There is a popular opinion among these people that the best treatment for AIDS is multivitamins, dietary changes, homeopathy, cleansing and even some dipshit thing called "imagery."

Even worse, this woman has promoted the idea that pregnant women should not take antiretroviral drugs to prevent passing the virus to their babies, ignoring the fact that since this has become the standard treatment for expectant mothers the rate of babies born with the virus to HIV-positive mothers has plummeted. As mentioned in the NYT article, she practiced what she preached and her daughter died of AIDS. She continues to deny that it was AIDS that killed her kid.

Anyway, to get back to my point why the Foo Fighters suck even more than we thought before, you can read about this crazy woman on your own, I discovered something during my little exploration of her site. Besides support from the leader of South Africa, it seems that she has big fans in the Foos. If you go to the community/causes section of their official website they have a link to the Alive & Well website, with the description ‚"Alive & Well is a non-profit grassroots education, support, and research organization founded by a group of HIV positive diagnosed men and women who have learned to live in health without AIDS drugs and without fear of illness."

Sounds real nice if you don't know the truth behind this "research" organization.

The sad part is that this is listed with a bunch of great social and political causes like Campus Progress, Future Forest and Runoff Voting. They have put this lunatic fringe group side by side with genuine progressive organizations and given them an image of legitimacy.

This crazy woman, Christine Maggiore, should be in jail for killing her kid by not providing medical treatment. Instead, she's getting her picture taken with the president of South Africa and hanging out with Gen-X indie-poppers who promote her insanity.

And that's why it's dangerous what they are doing. The Foos have a lot of fans who weren't around in the beginning of the AIDS era and don't know what a difference the development of these drugs has made. Some newly diagnosed, young, scared, impressionable music fan could be steered to this questionable organization and get bombarded with a load of legitimate sounding misinformation and decide to not seek out real treatment for HIV/AIDS because of the Foo Fighters' promotion of this whacko group. They should be ashamed of themselves.

Making shitty music is forgivable, maybe. Spreading deadly propaganda is abhorrent.